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.