Maybe on P?..on IV? On some women in his fiction?

[Mark Kohut]

>From a review in The National of Martin Amis's new book:

The real rupture in The Pregnant Widow – one presumes Amis considers it the central rupture of his generation – is the Sexual Revolution. “Girls acting like boys,” as he puts it, with characteristic chauvinism. Some did benefit from the liberalisation of sexual mores, he suggests, especially at the outset, but on the male side of the ledger – that is, his side – the long story is of “the incredible shrinking man.” (He doesn’t sketch the other side of the ledger, the putatively positive one, all that plausibly, but neither is he as dour about the fallout as Michel Houellebecq.)

Like any revolution, this one delivered more than just what was promised at the outset. “The first clause in the revolutionary manifesto went as follows: There will be sex before marriage.” The second item: “Women, also, have carnal appetites.” Point three “was a kind of sleeper clause,” Amis writes: “Surface will start tending to supersede essence.”