Amis says novels are all about ‘masculinity’

Martin Amis, as reported here, has used some of his past romantic conquests as the inspiration for certain scenes and characters in his forthcoming novel, The Pregnant Widow, which will be published this autumn. Far from summoning the lawyers, one of these, Emma Soames, Sir Winston Churchill's grand-daughter, appears to relish the prospect. "I am not going to stick my neck out and say that I have nothing to fear," she tells the Independent. "But writers have to draw on their past experiences, so I do not mind if Martin has done so with ours."

While Amis has yet to comment on this aspect on the book, which is set in the 1970s when Soames and himself were an item, he has offered some details about the work in general in an interview with the US magazine, Vice. "It is a novel set in the social revolution, and the main character is 20 years old," he says. "Its title comes from a remark by the wonderful Russian thinker Alexander Herzen. He said that when political or social orders change by revolution one should be pleased that the old is giving way to the new, but the trouble is that you get the death of the new order and no heir apparent.

"You are left not with a child but a pregnant widow, and much grief and tribulation will take place between the death and the birth."

Amis also talks about his role as creative writing professor at Manchester University. "All I do is teach novels," he confides. "What could be more agreeable than that? I don't guide my students' elbows while they write. In fact, I don't even see what they write. We talk about it a little and I talk a lot about Nabokov, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky, all of whom are the people I like to talk about anyway. So I'm rather happy with myself."

The subject of 9/11 also comes up. Says Amis: "When September 11 came along, I wasn't prepared for anything as interesting as that to happen in my lifetime. If I had to explain what my novels were about in one word it would be masculinity, and here was masculinity in a whole new form... The social history of man is simply sex."

Finally Amis, who will be 60 this year, admits that he has very little time for writers younger than himself. "The truth is that I don't read my youngers. It seems a terribly uneconomical way to organise your reading, by studying those unproved by time. I read my friends, so I take in Will Self and Zadie Smith with great interest. It all seems healthy out there but I can't make any broad statements about ‘where’ the novel is now." ·