Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow savaged in US

Martin Amis received some lukewarm reviews for his latest novel The Pregnant Widow when it was released in Britain earlier this year. But they were nothing compared to the scathing response the American edition has garnered from literary critics across the pond, in particular an especially withering write-up from Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times.
 
Kakutani, the newspaper's chief literary critic who is notorious for skewering hapless writers in her reviews, has accused Amis of "trad[ing] his mastery of language... for a mannered, self-indulgent style".  
 
Her review starts: "This remarkably tedious new novel..." and goes downhill from there. The Pregnant Widow's main hero Keith Nearing - thought to be based on Amis himself - is a "pretentious jerk, blathering on about the novels he's read" while the rest of the "shoddily drawn" characters are a "bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed twits".
 
It is not the first time Amis has fallen foul of Kakutani in recent years. Although she described his 2007 work, House of Meetings, as "powerful [and] deeply affecting" she has pulled few punches when reviewing the rest of his work this past decade.
 
As The First Post reported in 2008, Kakutani savaged his collection of essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, branding it "pretentious and formulaic" and "chuckleheaded". Of his 2003 effort Yellow Dog, Kakutani said it read like a send-up of a Martin Amis novel, bearing "as much resemblance to Amis's best fiction as a bad karaoke singer does to Frank Sinatra".
 
Over at the Washington Post Amis fared no better, with reviewer Ron Charles asking: "Why... has [Amis] become such an exasperating novelist?" and calling the book "overlong".
 
Amis was no doubt braced for a grilling by US reviewers when he opened the papers this week. When The Pregnant Widow was published in Britain in February, the Sunday Times's lead fiction critic, Peter Kemp, called it "lofty" and "ramshackle" and for a while it looked as if Amis would pull out of the Oxford Literary Festival, sponsored by the paper. In the end, he swallowed his pride and turned up. ·