Martin Amis ‘pulls out of lit fest after bad review’

There were strong rumours on Sunday that Martin Amis has pulled out of the upcoming Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival following a scathing review of his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, from the Sunday Times itself.

He is the second author rumoured to have quit the March festival because of a lousy review in the Sunday Times: earlier in January, the historian Antonia Fraser was reported to have withdrawn after Robert Harris had been rude about the recent memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go?

If Amis, or anyone else involved in the much-trumpeted launch of The Pregnant Widow, was expecting the paper's lead fiction critic, Peter Kemp, to pull his punches because of the author's invitation to the literary festival, they had another think coming when they opened the paper yesterday.

He attacked The Pregnant Widow for its ramshackle structure and meandering storyline and described the female characters as "plastic figments from the usual Amis mould... [who] aren't filled out much beyond their vital statistics: Lily ('34-25-34'), Scheherazade ('37-23-33'), Rita ('32-30-31'), big-bottomed Gloria Beautyman ('33-22-37')."

In general, Kemp found the book a big let-down after all the pre-publicity. "Readers have been alerted that something full of turbulence was heading their way," he wrote. "After this, it comes as something of a surprise to find that the subject he is fearlessly taking on is a group of loungers-around having a holiday in Italy."

In particular, Kemp felt Amis's prose "strained for loftiness" (sunbathers are "under the burning axle of the parent star") while certain images were strained ("Keith imagined her buttocks as a pair of giant testicles... Not oval but perfectly round").

Kemp's stinker rounded off an uncomfortable week for Amis. As The First Post reported a week ago, Amis used a pre-launch interview with the Sunday Times Magazine to call for euthanasia to be made more readily available, with "a booth on every corner" where the elderly and demented could end their lives with "a martini and a medal".

Amis has had to deal with a welter of criticism, including an accusation of "flippancy" from the American novelist Joan Brady. "Trivialising a subject of enormous magnitude just to flog a book?" she commented. "How can a man prostitute himself like this?"

According to a publishing expert interviewed by The First Post today, there is "history" between Amis and Kemp. "He is not the only critic to think Amis's early work was his best and that recent novels have not done him proud," he said.

In the case of Antonia Fraser, the problem was that Robert Harris - a successful thriller writer - was also down to appear at the Oxford festival. Lady Antonia, it seems, was not won over by Harris's Sunday Times review, which suggested that ever since Pinter left his first wife (the actress Vivien Merchant) for her, his work as a playwright had gone downhill.

"Unfortunately, with the exception of Betrayal, his clever and clear-eyed anatomy of an extramarital affair, not much of what Pinter wrote in the last 30 years of his career stands comparison with what he produced in the first 20.

"Perhaps the undoubted domestic happiness of his second marriage removed the grit that he had needed for creation. Or perhaps swapping a wife who was an actress for one who was a political hostess and historian led him away from the theatre and, disastrously, towards the lecture-hall rostrum." ·