There are probably scads and scads of books like 13. I’ve seen them in libraries and used book stores. They are books that take on one topic and mine it for endless anecdotes and historical curios, but they don’t claim that by looking through the prism of the topic at hand, a reader can discern the entire arc of human history. The books are about what they are about, and all you need to do as a reader is sit back and be entertained and informed. John McPhee, who is very good at this sort of thing, once wrote a book entirely about Oranges, for example. Nathaniel Lachenmeyer does this sort of thing well, too. His book is an impeccably researched look at an old superstition. With every turn of the page the reader is presented with another odd relic that Lachenmeyer has dug up for our perusal: the existence of popular superstition-defying “13 clubs” at the beginning of the 20th century, for example. And onward the book moves through Friday the 13th, the missing 13th floor, and all the rest. Taken as a whole, the book is a nifty piece of well-researched reportage bringing to light the many murky progenitors of this now commonplace superstition.
Review: 13: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Superstition by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Really Bad People: On Sebastian Junger’s ‘Tribe’
“I do miss something from the war,” Bosnian journalist Nidzara Ahmetasevic tells Sebastian Junger halfway through his new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Ahmetasevic is talking about the wartime closeness she shared with friends in a basement bomb shelter in besieged Sarajevo. “The love that we shared was enormous,” Ahmetasevic says. “I missed being close to people, I missed being loved in that way.”
The sentiment lies at the heart of Tribe, a book offering a surprising thesis about the ways humans have traded communal belonging for excessive safety.
Junger gets a considerable amount done in a quick 133 pages: Tribe posits a reason why white settlers found life among Native American tribes appealing, theorizes about false PTSD claims among returned U.S. veterans, and conveys the author’s equality-minded view of how heroic behavior varies between genders -- all in addition to remarks on hitchhiking, attachment parenting, Junger’s dad’s opinion of military service, and more. It’s an awful lot of ground to cover in such a short book, and it’s inevitable that Tribe would either feel inchoate and sketched or else aggravatingly dense. Because Junger is an adventurous storyteller (rather than, say, an academic theoretician), he opts for the former.
It’s not necessarily a good thing. The book’s lightness makes it accessible, an easy entry point to weighty subject matter. But its concision can make Tribe feel breezy even as it discusses life and death -- if not outright incomprehensible.
Tribe is essentially a critique of modern civilization, beginning with Junger's observation of the inexorable appeal of Native American lifeways to early settlers (“The intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessary compete with”). It proceeds through an examination of how disastrous or violent circumstances can create similar human closeness, and includes a discussion of how our society’s distancing itself from such harsh conditions has inadvertently sharpened those events’ capacity to traumatize the people who endure them.
All of these points have been covered in other, heavier books. Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday examines traditional tribal lifestyles’ usefulness in the present day. The entanglement of war with human closeness and purpose is the focus of Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. (Both Hedges and Junger include the same anecdote, in fact, about a teenage couple in besieged Sarajevo, that dies, sniper-shot, on the banks of the Miljacka River.) Junger also briefly mentions the work of seminal disaster researcher Charles Fritz, noting that Fritz could find almost no examples of mass panic during large-scale disasters. This plays into his overarching point that difficult experiences can be unifying rather than shattering. The exact same studies by Fritz and fellow researchers -- and that exact same, crucial point -- are detailed in Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant A Paradise Built in Hell.
Junger uses these insights towards another point. “Because modern society has almost completely eliminated trauma and violence from everyday life, anyone who does suffer these things is deemed to be extraordinarily unfortunate,” he writes. “This gives people access to sympathy and resources but also creates an identity of victimhood that can delay recovery.” This is an important observation. It, too, resonates quite closely with previous work -- in this case Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman’s seminal book Trauma and Recovery, which remarks that “to hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance.”
What Junger achieves, then, is to assemble parts of all those books into one slim volume. So much the better for the busy reader. Unfortunately, Junger’s quick look at violence, trauma, and modern anomie also omits important information from other books, and as a result ends up on shaky ground, failing to consider counterpoints or bring its own arguments to a close.
Part of the takeaway from this book is that regarding military service as a source of permanent psychiatric disability is incorrect for most soldiers. Junger includes a lengthy discussion of how the U.S. Veterans Administration mishandles former soldiers’ mental health issues, and how America’s cultural misunderstanding of war plays into that deleterious milieu. The information isn’t wrong per se, but what it has to do with the rest of the romanticizing of foregone tribal lifeways, etc., or why that necessitates anything more than the 2015 Vanity Fair article from which the book sprung is never quite made clear. Worse, Junger says that the low rate of combat engagement among U.S. soldiers means their diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder often aren’t real -- but he fails to consider that some soldiers develop PTSD from military sexual trauma, or from other adverse experiences outside of combat or before their enlistment.
Worse, he seems to misunderstand the diagnosis entirely. Here, as in the Vanity Fair article, Junger describes his own bout with what he calls “classic short-term PTSD,” departing from this insight to further dissect trauma and the ways modern society misunderstands it. The problem is, there really is no such thing as “short-term PTSD.” It sounds like what Junger had was post-traumatic stress, a weeks- or months-long psychological adaptation to adverse events (in his case, exposure to war) that typically resolves on its own. Although psychological care can sometimes be relevant, most mental health professionals don’t regard this as an illness. (Tellingly, Junger’s approach to his diagnosis involved little more than an acquaintance’s ad hoc comment at “a family picnic.”) Post-traumatic stress disorder is only diagnosable after three to six months, does not often go away on its own, and can endure for a lifetime if untreated. The implication that Junger’s case is typical PTSD is misleading -- and to some extent, calls his conclusions into question.
The problems in his argument go even deeper. “In Bosnia -- as it is now -- we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people,” Ahmetasevic tells Junger. “We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you.” Junger’s thesis is that other cultures (the “Stone-Age tribes” white settlers once joined) did learn that lesson. But he assumes that violence is innate to humans and necessary for human closeness, never parsing evidence that it is not. And he doesn’t examine what this Bosnian journalist means by “really bad,” and how becoming so after the war might have arisen directly from the painful, long-lasting effects of the severe trauma Junger doesn’t quite seem to believe in.
He does argue that collective dissatisfaction with our “society that is basically at war with itself” should lead to a large-scale rearrangement of our lives and lifestyles. (“I also believe that the world we are living in -- and the peace that we have -- is very fucked up if somebody is missing war,” Ahmetasevic offers.) In a time of impending ecological disaster, that’s worth considering. Junger’s point about encouraging stronger communities and more human closeness is a good one. But this half-baked, too-brief book, so scattershot that its message is hard to ascertain, won’t get us there.
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The Memory That Never Was: Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking With Einstein
Given enough time, all science writing—no matter how casually or clinically it is presented—winds up being wrong. Likewise, any work of participatory journalism that finds the undertaking more interesting than the author is bound for obscurity.
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A Genre Is Born: The Babylon Rite Slaughters Its Darlings
Walter Benjamin would have loved this guy Tom Knox. He didn't just dissolve a genre. He poured half a dozen genres into a literary Waring blender and hit the puree button.
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Creating a World: On Joseph Roth’s ‘The Hotel Years’
Roth is perpetually engaging, whether he is decrying the Third Reich, criticizing clichéd notions of Russia, enumerating the unpleasant realities of travel, or simply commenting on the quirks of a hotel cook.
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We Came From A Free People: On Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State
These are evil men, but Gay makes certain that we never forget that they are men, made of the same hope and fury and flesh as us.
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A Brief History of the Future: On James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History
“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
—Susan Sontag, quoting “an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy,” but part of which (i.e., the first half) is often attributed to John Archibald Wheeler (who “admitted to having found it scrawled in a Texas men’s room”), Woody Allen, and Albert Einstein, but which actually appeared before all of these figures were supposed to have said or written it in a novel by Ray Cummings from 1922 called The Girl in the Golden Atom and is spoken by a character named Big Business Man, so I guess one can only really credit Sontag (or, I suppose, the “old riff” to which she refers) with the part about space (which, admittedly, is a totally brilliant and enriching addendum; really makes the phrase, don’t you think?), and if you think this quote attribution is convoluted and confusing well then hold onto your hats, there, buddy, because shit’s about to get real weird
Tom Robbins, in his 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, abruptly interrupts the narrative and briefly expounds on the nature of time in literature. “Even though we agree that time is relative,” he writes, “that most subjective notions of it are inaccurate just as most objective expressions of it are arbitrary…even so, we have come to expect, for better or worse, some sort of chronological order in the books we read, for it is the function of literature to provide what life has not.” He has interjected, he explains, to inform the reader of some reordering of certain events -- i.e., that the events of Parts I and II occurred after the events currently being described in Part III. “The author apologizes” for any confusion but “does not, however, disavow the impulses that lead to his presentation…nor does he, in repentance, embrace the notion that literature should mirror reality.” Moreover, he continues:
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let’s not kid ourselves -- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
This passage -- one of my very favorites -- drifted into my mind (a psychological phenomenon referred to, I now know, as “involuntary mental time travel”) as I read through James Gleick’s fascinating new book Time Travel: A History, as Robbins’s quote seems to have anticipated (or, maybe, pre-emptively challenged) just such a work. What could any book, a mere vessel of subjective interpretation, tell us about time, an invisible system of measuring change? I suspected that by the end I’d either feel tricked or confounded.
It turns out that I felt neither deceived nor confused -- or, rather, I did feel those things, but about the subject and not the book. Gleick’s hybrid of history, literary criticism, theoretical physics, and philosophical meditation is itself a time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey, and it works so well. Even though Gleick can elucidate complex ideas into accessible language, he’s even better at explicating notions that remain perplexing. That is, he’s good at explaining paradoxes -- itself a sort of paradoxical phrase, paradoxes supposedly being logical contradictions that defy common sense and are thus difficult -- if not impossible -- to comprehend. But a subject like time travel, as we savvy citizens of the 21st century well know by now, is rife with paradox, and any account of its history must not only engage with those incongruities but transcend them in some powerful way. There has to be, in other words, more insight than one would find in a given episode of Doctor Who.
That’s not to say that elements of popular culture are out of the time-travel historian’s reach (Doctor Who, for instance, is fruitfully used by Gleick in Time Travel), but rather that such an enterprise’s primary subject must only ostensibly be time travel but that it’s truly about why we’re so interested in the subject and what that means about who we are. The infinite intricacies of moving forward or backward in time have been so thoroughly dissected by popular culture that, quite amazingly, these meta-cognitive and entirely theoretical ideas have become clichés. In her fun and insightful new book Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies, Hadley Freeman notes a plot hole in 1985’s Back to the Future: “But complaining about credibility issues in a movie about time travel is surely the definition of carping.” And to think that humanity, as a species, didn’t even consider the concept of time travel until a little more than 100 years ago, and already such innovative and cerebral ideas have grown so banal they’re barely worthy of comment. It is amazing what human beings can become bored with.
Gleick is particularly suited to the task of writing a history of time travel. His previous books include Genius, a rich biography of physics bad-boy Richard Feynman; The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, which traces the origins of the information age; and Chaos: Making a New Science, a work that tackles chaos theory and that made “the Butterfly Effect” a common term. Gleick was also the founder, with Uday Ivatury, of The Pipeline in 1993, one of the earliest Internet service providers. Time travel, for such a writer, must be almost bromidic. And to be sure, there is a slight trace of disdain in Gleick for his subject here, almost as if he’s getting annoyed having to explicate ideas he knows are hogwash -- e.g., his takedown of “time capsules,” which he refers to as “a special kind of foolishness,” -- or having the irksome duty of assembling such declarations as, “In point of fact, time is not a river.”
But by the end of the book I too developed a frustration with the myriad arguments surrounding time -- not at any of the arguers but of the flimsiness of my hold on it as a subject of speculation. Every time I felt I had a grasp on a particular way of thinking about time, some new theory threw my understanding out the window. For example, Gleick begins his history with the creator of time travel, H.G. Wells, and his monumental work of science fiction of 1895, The Time Machine. In its early pages, the protagonist, the Time Traveller, Socratically explains the basics of his invention with some skeptical (and similarly ersatz) characters:
'You know of course [said the Time Traveller] that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.'
'That is all right,' said the Psychologist.
'Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.'
'There I object,' said Filby. 'Of course a solid body may exist. All real things-'
'So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?'
'Don’t follow you,' said Filby.
'Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?'
Filby became pensive. 'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in four dimensions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and -- Duration.”
Gleick calls Filby a “poor sap” for putting up such a “feeble resistance” to the Time Traveller’s points, but for me such a basic explanation was revelatory -- to consider duration as a necessary component to existence seems not only true but rather obvious once you’ve learned it.
But it quickly becomes clear that the validity of time as the “fourth dimension” wasn’t going to last too long in the rapid development of subsequent time travel theorems and the physics and quantum mechanics that eventually joined the party. Just as my brain congratulated itself for its keen comprehension, it was thrown for a new loop. Not that this is Gleick’s fault, of course -- the very subject of time travel invites headaches if pondered longer than a few minutes, and Gleick’s book totals 336 pages of mind-bending conundra: some mental pain is inevitable, both for author and reader.
Gleick, though, through his years of scientific authorship, has become an artful writer who clearly has a deep love for literature, consequently employing fictional techniques in his nonfiction work. He repeatedly opens sections with the mise-en-scène of novels or TV show episodes that feature time travel, as in this description of the opening of La Jetée, a film by Chris Marker from 1962 that is made up of only still images, and which was the inspiration for the 1995 Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys:
We begin again. A woman stands at the end of “pier” -- the open-air observation platform at Orly Airport (la grande jetée D’Orly), over-looking a sea of concrete on which the great metal jetliners rest, pointed like arrows toward the future. The sun is pale in a charcoal sky. We hear shrill jet blasts, a ghostly choir, murmuring voices.
There is a ton of rhetorical work going on here, the kind usually associated with fictional narratives, from the thematic reference of the jets “pointed like arrows toward the future” to the asyndeton in the final sentence. Or consider Time Travel's opening sentence, introducing Wells’s Time Traveller: “A man stands at the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods -- a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials.” Notice how subtly Gleick takes us from literal description (“A man stands...”) to metaphorical commentary (the 19th century as “a drafty corridor”) to literary criticism (“...the poor reader...”) to cluing us into the fact that he’s talking about a novel (“despite the listing of parts...”). Gleick may have a little of the frustrated novelist in him, but he’s certainly learned well how to exercise (and exorcise) that frustration advantageously. Time Travel is as elegant and eloquent as it is edifying.
This love of literature manifests in other ways in the book, too, also beneficially. Though Gleick runs the gambit of physicists and philosophers and theorists (from St. Augustine to Stephen Hawking), he’s most fruitful and fun and alive as a writer when he dissects novels and films and television -- which is more than fitting considering that time travel itself was the invention of a fiction writer; Gleick, by featuring more fiction than theory, as it were, is merely staying in the tradition that originated the notion. For instructive tools, Gleick takes the reader through, e.g., Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and William Gibson’s The Peripheral and, most interestingly, E.M. Forster’s bleak and just fucking weird novella The Machine Stops. But perhaps my favorite is that episode of Doctor Who Gleick discusses (which I at first wanted to summarize here to grapple with a bit but which proved way too elaborate to do in anything fewer than like seven or eight sentences, and this is already getting too long as it is). Part of the fun of these sections is the various ways Gleick uses them to demonstrate certain abstractions or murky concepts, but what really makes them sing is how richly palpable Gleick’s love for sci-fi is -- for its inventiveness, yes, but more so for its playfulness, the way it can positively relish the paradoxes and the moral dilemmas and the general confusion of it all. (Best example: Robert Heinlein’s short story “By Your Bootstraps.”)
And his love is particularly noticeable when set against his growing irritation at now commonly accepted views of time -- most of which he so obviously disagrees with. “Timelessness, eternity, the four-dimensional spacetime loaf,” he concludes, “These are the illusions.” Time, for Gleick, no matter how skillful the rhetoric or how tempting the logic, simply cannot be denied its reality (or at least our illusion of its reality), because of how completely it situates our experiences of everyday life. It is, rather, space that is the illusion.
By the end I found I concurred with Gleick about time’s irrepressible existence, which might have warranted more examination of our psychological perception of time, as in Claudia Hammond’s 2013 engaging work Time Warped, which mostly ignores those dusty arguments over whether or not time exists and instead focuses on the way we experience it as a phenomenon. She notes, for instance, that as humans we’re not only organized by time but also exceptionally skilled at it (though, Hammond notes, citing Jean Piaget, the “father of developmental psychology,” that as children, we “find it hard to distinguish between size as it relates to time and size as it relates to space”). Hammond shows how time affects more aspects of our lives than we might assume, like conversations:
To produce and understand speech, we rely on critical timings of less than a tenth of a second. The difference between the sound of a ‘pa’ and a ‘ba’ is all in the timing of the delay before the subsequent vowel, so if the delay is longer you hear a ‘p,’ if it’s short you hear a ‘b.’ If you put your hand on your vocal cords you can even feel that with the ‘ba’ your lips open at the same time as you feel your cords start to vibrate. With the ‘pa’ the vibrations starts a moment earlier. This relies on timing accurate to the millisecond.
If the abstract debates over time are inadequate at worst and irrelevant at best, then shouldn’t these be the kinds of ideas we focus on? If time (and not space) is fundamental to nature, and we’re stuck with its effects no matter how much of an illusion we “prove” it to be, then our clever excursions through the epochs in science fiction might not be the most productive use of our intellectual attention.
But what the hell do I know? With each thought regarding all these pitfall-ridden concepts, I second-guess myself, and I begin to relate to Tom Robbins’s meditation in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. After his apology for mucking up the chronology and noting that books don’t actually reflect reality, he adds that he’s got a repertoire of sentences at his disposal, to do with what he wishes. “This sentence is made of yak wool,” he writes, while another sentence “has a crush on Norman Mailer.” “This sentence went to Woodstock” goes another, and “this little sentence went wee wee all the way home.” It’s a fun bit, but the one I really relate to is the final one: “This sentence is rather confounded by the whole damn thing.”
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The New Normal: Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow
It is the summer of 1970, a “hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer," and Keith Nearing—twenty-year-old University-of-London-student (English Literature), occupying “that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—takes up residence in an Italian castle, accompanied by his girlfriend Lily—“5’5”, 34-25-34," also a fellow student (law), on-again after a brief but fraught respite initiated by Lily’s desire to “act like a boy”—and Lily’s best friend, the nobly-born and enticingly-named Scheherazade—“5’10”, 37-23-33," only very recently transformed from an unremarkable, bespectacled do-gooder into a swan-necked, amply-bosomed goddess. And because vital statistics, as Keith well knows, are destiny, his own fate seems already determined: he will feel bound to Lily, bound by gratitude and compatibility and history; he will desire Scheherazade, desire her madly, greedily, recklessly.
This is the basic premise of Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, and it is a simple premise really: a love triangle powered by youthful lust and a suitably exotic locale. Then again, maybe not so simple, for Keith is, of course, “a K in a castle," which lends the proceedings an air of ominous possibility. And there is the matter too of the time, the historical context, the summer of 1970, portentous beginning of the Age of Narcissus, the self-reflective, self-absorbed, seemingly endless “All and Now” follow-up to the Age of Aquarius, whose tentative stirrings have given way to full-on revolution. (You know how sexual intercourse began in 1963, sometime around the release of The Beatles’ first LP? Well, by the time we get to our castle in Montale, The Beatles have broken up.) And revolutions, well, revolutions are…complicated, cutting a swath of collateral damage, and The Pregnant Widow—subtitle: “Inside History”—chronicles the sublime chasm between world orders new and old, the “long night of chaos and desolation” that must pass “between the death of the one and the birth of the other.” (This vision of destruction comes courtesy of the philosopher Alexander Herzen, whose observation that “the departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow” also lends the novel its title.)
Here then are the clauses of the Revolutionary Manifesto, as documented after-the-fact (though the bulk of the book focuses on the crucial summer, the narrative reaches into the present-day):
“There will be sex before marriage.”
“Women, also, have carnal appetites.”
“Surface will start tending to supersede essence."
Sex will be separated from feeling, much like feeling was long ago detached from thought, and sex will also be separated from thought.
How Keith will navigate the new normal, find his footing on terrain much longed for but little understood, furnishes the narrative’s true interest. This is not so say that The Pregnant Widow is preoccupied with Big Ideas at the expense of development and action; there is, in fact, much by way of plot.
The castle—property of Scheherazade’s thirty-year-old uncle, Jorquil (“it was that kind of family”)—is equipped with wings and turrets and a pool, where the newly beautiful, newly liberated Scheherazade sunbathes topless and learns to love her own reflection, but it quickly grows crowded. As the summer gets underway, Keith, Lily, and Scheherazade are intermittently joined by Whitaker and Amen, an older English expat and his eighteen-year-old Libyan boyfriend; by the Scheherazade-admiring Adriano, a dashing aristocrat, who also happens to be 4’10”; by the Dakotan divorcee Prentiss, who has in tow her recently adopted twelve-year-old Mexican daughter, Conchita, and her grossly obese helpmate, Dodo; by the Sphinx-like Gloria Beautyman—“5’5”, 33-22-37”— whose riddle is concealed behind a body joining a dancer’s upper half with a bottom that earns her the nickname “Junglebum;” by Timmy, Scheherazade’s erstwhile boyfriend, returning from a stint in Jerusalem, where he had gone to convert the Jews; by Rita, known as “the Dog” (because “she reminds you of a dog”), a proud warrior of the Sexual Revolution. These interlopers lend the novel a Dickensian texture, an impression further abetted by their tendency towards resonant if improbable names (though this is of course also quite consistent with Amis’s typical style) and memorable quirks. They take in the sights and the swimming, the splendid dinners and the lovely grounds, and, in return, they full-heartedly immerse themselves in castle life, sometimes aiding, sometimes impeding Keith’s schemes to seduce Scheherazade without hurting the suspicious Lily.
Will Keith succeed? Perhaps the more pertinent question is, will Keith survive? Will Keith—literally the orphaned son of a pregnant widow, his father having died in a car accident on his way to the hospital, his bereaved mother quickly following in childbirth—emerge intact, integrated in thought and feeling? Will he master and navigate and accept the new ideology, the new world order his moment in history makes him heir to? Armed with nothing more than the English literary canon, Keith at first seems to stand little chance. Clarissa, he surmises, is boring, with its “one fuck in two thousand pages," its heroine who must die of shame. But Keith’s reading and Keith’s experiences finally prove that revolutions in sex, like revolutions in literature, change only the surface, the wording, not the import, and though The Pregnant Widow could never be confused for, say, an Austen novel, there is something old-fashioned about it. Perhaps it is its sincerity, a real attempt to tell some essential truth, a truth at once of its time and timeless. Perhaps it is its investment in its characters and its worldview. Or its quiet humor, funny and cutting and sly. Or its intelligence, its knowingness, which never seems pretentious or irrelevant. Which is a long way to say that there is much to recommend it.
A great deal has been said, in recent reviews of The Pregnant Widow, about Amis’s return to form, his artistic success after a series of disappointments. (Indeed, there was some surprise when the book was conspicuously left off the Man Booker Prize longlist.) Like Philip Roth, to whom he has been compared since the beginning of his career, Amis seems to be initiating his sixties by embarking on an ambitious, historically-minded project with keen insight and masterly sentences. But this is, of course, speculation. Something more definitive then: The Pregnant Widow is a stunning book; it contains within it all that is best in the English novel.
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