A gallery of grotesques

After the turn-of the-century memoir Experience, Martin Amis’s career has been widely perceived as somewhat rocky, shading into moments of disaster. If Experience, with its triple narrative of father, teeth and Fred West, was regarded as a compelling and masterly whole, Amis’s subsequent novels and non-fiction have not been as widely admired.

Yellow Dog was quite a mess, getting some terrible reviews. The return to the knockabout vulgarian comedy that had made Amis’s name just lacked conviction. House of Meetings was more generally admired, being a fictional offshoot of a bizarre exercise, the non-fiction Koba the Dread. Both books were concerned with the crimes of Soviet Russia.

The Pregnant Widow divided readers. I have to say that I loved this romantic, funny tale of the sexual revolution taking place over a 1970s Italian summer, and the extended coda of the 40 years that followed. It married, for the first time in Amis’s work, broad and irresistible comedy with a sense of people who were warm, rounded and unpredictable; its rendering of the sad, short life of Amis’s alcoholic sister Sally was heartbreaking. At least I thought so. It is fair to say that other reviewers were more dismissive — it is sometimes difficult to explain a joke to the New York Times.

What seems stronger in Amis’s work in recent years is the humane tenderness for individuals. It is not brought in to prove a point against the prevailing grotesquery, like the angelic Kim Talent in London Fields. Rather, virtue is examined carefully, and often ascribed to women’s literacy and thought, as in Lucy Partington in Experience; long suffering, like Keith and his sister in The Pregnant Widow, is not the cause of laughter but of grave sympathy.