The Globe and Mail

Martin Amis, in The Pregnant Widow, describes what psychologists call an animal birthday: “An animal birthday is when your body happens to you.”

Amis's protagonist, Keith, is about to turn 21, and he is waiting for a young woman named Scheherazade to happen to him. He is waiting for the weather to break and the sun to come out so that Scheherazade will appear topless, poolside, at the Italian castle where Keith is lolling away his summer while reading through the British canon.

There's nothing else to do for days on end, in this castle, but to long for illicit sex, to ruminate on it and dream about it. Or to at least read about it. Keith is waiting for the sexual revolution to go full-throttle. Amis means to capture the seventies in this novel, but with an older, experienced narrator's historicity in mind. Old Keith is casting back on a body that was happening, from a body that has already happened.

This is not just the seventies. This is not just youth and beauty and lust and the sexual revolution, the Cold War and a castle in Italy. This is all of that seen through a narrator who knows what will become of it. Old Keith looks in the mirror each day to discover that his face has morphed: “Beyond a certain age you no longer know what you look like. Something goes wrong with mirrors.”

Age has created the need to remember it all the way it happened: “Everything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are true …” The author peeks through the fiction, now and then, to wink at the reader – more smoke and mirrors.

While Amis is very funny about sex, he is very serious about getting old

In Amis's memoir, Experience, there is a note about literary reviewers. He suggests that the reviewer probably has higher ambitions for her prose than “book chat.” Amis suggests, in fact, that many reviews are fuelled by envy. So I will be up front and admit I am deeply envious of how funny The Pregnant Widow is. Amis is very, very funny about sex. I began folding down the pages every time I laughed out loud and now my copy is like a child's pop-up book. The pages fan open.

Here is a romantic comedy in the vein of Jane Austen – whom both Keith and Amis (as he admits in the acknowledgments) admire for her sanity and her great feminism – only Amis is more like pornography. “Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described,” Amis tells us.

So, back at the castle, there are bikinis, monokinis, beautiful breasts and beautiful arses; Keith watches the agape develop, totally agape. Throughout, he maintains a feverish devotion to Scheherazade's breasts and Gloria Beautyman's arse and lots of other females' body parts.

Is there sexual objectification in this male gaze? Amis seems bent on delving into the past to ask exactly what happened during that brief unfettering of social constrictions between the sexes. How did the sexual revolution shake down? Who came out on top?

What we learn: Keith has a hard time with women. They are wiser and often more free and, for a brief time, during an idyllic summer in Italy, they wielded their fair share of sexual power: “And all the decades, until 1970, were undeniably he decades. … But the Me Decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade.”