Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your ‘bald patch receding into infinity’, you say to yourself, ‘Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.’

This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis’ latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis’ sex life, but Amis canned that concept as he found the prospect ’sort of disgusting, really… icky’. Instead Amis bent the truth a bit, and told us the story of Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old trying to come to grips with the sexual revolution, where girls are trying to act like boys, while boys are trying to get into the ‘cool pants’ of the girls.

Unusually for a 20-year-old … Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life.

The Pregnant Widow is Martin Amis’ search through his past for ‘love and life’ and what it all meant. It can read at times like the gruff memories of an ageing man, with the ‘when I was young’ stories.

When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around for too long. Time moved past them but they dreamed they stayed the same.

The story itself can neatly be separated by a fuck. There is before the fuck, and after the fuck. The ‘before-the-fuck’ occurs in the confines of a castle in Italy in 1970, while the ‘after-the-fuck’ meanders slowly (and awkwardly) through a couple of decades in London and into the present day, or at least 2009.

The ‘before-the-fuck’ period reads like an old English novel (Amis references Austen, Bronte, Lawrence, Dickens and others throughout the novel). According to Keith Nearing, who is an aspiring critic, the English novel consists of the ‘anticipation’ of waiting for the woman to fall. In Amis’ retake of the English the novel, we are waiting for the man to fall, and then during the ‘after-the-fuck’ period we see the consequences of that fall, and exactly how far he fell.

Amis posits that the sexual revolution has left us detached from ourselves and the other. During the featured fuck of the novel, Keith Nearing describes the sensation of experience as unreal, where the colours were ‘wrong – all Day-Glo and wax museum,’ with hopeless acoustics and hopeless continuity.

One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures –

… Read more

But we don’t disappear into thin air. There is something left behind. There is our shit that disappears down the drain. There is our piss soaking into the earth. There are our toenails, fingernails, our pubic hair, our facial hair, our snot, our cum, our smegma, our earwax. There is the sleep that sticks to our eyes, there is our dandruff and all those flakes of skin that dance in the sunlight. Daily our bodies fall apart and touch the earth. Our bodies end in the earth. Discarded. Excreted. Grounded.

I might be standing alone with my bare arse hanging out in the open, when I say that the novel Wetlands by Charlotte Roche has all the markings of a 21st century classic. A novel Sallie Tisdale of the New York Times described as “banal and repetitive” with “all the nuance of Mad Magazine and less wit.” A novel that opens with instructions on treating hemorrhoids:

For exterior itching, you squeeze a hazelnut-sized dollop from the tube onto your finger with the shortest nail and rub it onto your rosette. The tube’s also got a pointed attachment with lots of holes in it that allows you to shove it up your ass and squeeze salve out to quell the itchiness inside.

Wetlands has been described as “shocking”, “explicit” and every publishers dream sales pitch, “controversial,” but this has no bearing on why I consider the book significant. The graphic descriptions are hardly groundbreaking. Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye” broke that ground eighty years ago. Wetlands is significant because it captures a burgeoning 21st Century world view. World view is perhaps the wrong phrase here. Let’s call it a bare body view.

Wetlands is the story of 18-year-old Helen Memel who lies bare bottomed on a hospital bed in the Department of Internal Medicine at Maria Hilf Hospital after an accident involving shaving her anus. Helen revels in the various discharges of her body. She uses her smegma he way others use perfume:

I dip my finger into my pussy and dab a little slime behind my earlobes. It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek.

Wetlands celebrates all the bits and pieces that are generated from the body. The piss. The puke. The menstrual blood. The anal discharges. Wetlands celebrates the abject.

I never really understood the abject until I read Wetlands. I remember a couple of years… Read more

It is a strange state of affairs when we have a journalist, such as Leigh Sales, telling us all about doubt. Journalists might practice doubt, but they certainly don’t produce it, package it, and push it to the public. Journalists peddle certainty, not doubt. This happened. That happened. This person’s an expert. That person’s a victim. Never does a ‘maybe’ or a ‘might’ make the front page headlines. But maybe that’s just a matter of news style and form. Maybe that’s why Leigh Sales wrote an essay on the subject rather than put together a Lateline news bulletin. A news report that could have been followed by an interview with an expert on doubt. An expert that would probably be Leigh Sales now, she has, after-all, produced a book on the subject, albeit a very little book.

For Leigh Sales, doubt is instinctive, a natural state of being. She is uneasy about those who don’t doubt. According to her, people like Sarah Palin, with their “unwavering certainty in themselves and their beliefs and opinions,” suffer from a form of “moral vanity.” But Sales isn’t certain about this. If Sales was certain, she would fall into league with the rest of Australia’s high-profile commentators. That obnoxious bunch of people “who act – in public at least – as if they have never experienced a second of self-doubt or entertained the thought that they might be wrong.” So Sales might be wrong about doubt, but that doesn’t mean we should disregard her 10,000 word essay. It is after-all an essay. On doubt. Which is what the essay form is all about. Doubt.

According to Sales, most contemporary commentary stinks of certainty. Yet she has a nostalgia for journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow and Walter Lippman who “were the voices of reason and cool authority”. Surely a writer with a voice of authority would also stink of certainty. But possibly the difference here is a matter of hot authority versus cool authority. Sales infers that the hot authority of the contemporary commentator is achieved by shouting “more inflammatory invective louder than anybody else”.

Cool authority is probably accomplished by following the sage advice of 12th century French philosopher Pierre Abelard, a man that would be the doubt expert sitting opposite Sales in a Lateline interview, that is of course if he wasn’t long dead. The philosophy of Abelard informs much of Sales’ ideas ‘on doubt,’ she even chooses to open the book with a quote from him:

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Sales shares the view of the former face of Meet the Press, Tim Russert, who says that he tries… Read more

Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occured to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod – that is, almost death – and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

John Barth’s The Floating Opera is a novel about ‘almost-death’ or more succinctly ‘life’. Todd Andrews is a young solicitor who suffers a condition of the heart where every beat could be his last. He adapts various systems of living to cope with this condition. The first being life as a rake in college where ‘the goal was to drink the most whisky, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades’.

Todd Andrew’s fast living soon fizzled out on a brothel floor with a swollen prostate and a broken glass bottle embedded in his leg. He countered that system of living with life as a saint. This involved sitting on window sills, sunk in shadows, speaking very little. Life as a saint succeeded for Todd Andrews until his best friend loaned him his wife after a nice day of sailing. The next system of living was life as a cynic. Cynicism survived until the morning of June 21st (or 22nd) when Todd Andrews despaired.

The conclusion that swallowed me was this: There is no way to master the fact with which I live. Futility gripped me by the throat; my head was tight. The impulse to raise my arms and eyes to heaven was almost overpowering – but there was no one for me to raise them to. All I could do was clench my jaw, squint my arms, and shake my head from side to side. But every motion pierced me with its own futility, every new feeling with its private hopelessness, until a battery of little agonies attacked from all sides, each drawing its strength from the great agony within me.

The novel is soaked in Sixties nihilism yet Todd Andrews’ calculated and measured manner of living resembles the very systematic and applied ‘life guides’ featured in the Noughties phenomena of life hacking.

John Barth was only 24 when he wrote The Floating Opera. The novel involves that existential search for the solution to living that is prevalent in the early novels of writers… Read more