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Martin Amis’s new novel shows a regathering of his artistic energies

“First it was all moral patterning. And felt life. Then it was all drugs and fucks. Now it’s all tits and arses.” This pithily reductive progress report on Martin Amis’s new novel is spoken by a character in it, summing up not only her student boyfriend’s increasingly boisterous approach to Eng lit, but also, The Pregnant Widow suggests, the unintended consequences of a cultural revolution. She’s speaking in 1970 – the year, as the narrator notes elsewhere, of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Later in the decade, though not noted by the narrator, there will be The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies and Success: dispatches, as their author might now see it, from a battle of the sexes that was fought on unpredictably shifting terrain. Historical consciousness isn’t something you’d automatically ­associate with Amis, but here he is with a long novel set in the times he started out in, a novel that’s partly an advance post-mortem on his generation’s historically constituted sexual selves.

The first time round, in the 70s, these were matters of some interest to Amis’s literary generation, to which Keith Nearing, the new novel’s central figure, also belongs. Ian McEwan, for example, read Greer’s manifesto in 1971 and found it “a revelation”; his first two novels are, among other things, dreams about a collapse of male power. Amis, meanwhile, seemed to fit the sexual revolution into a wider sense of a world turning upside down, a sense that coarse, yobbish ways – ways that he was, as a good satirist, half in love with – were displacing high-minded talk about “felt life” and other literary-moral nostrums. Satirical inversions were his stock in trade, as in “It’s Disgusting at Your Age”, a slice of screenplay he published in 1976 and then cannibalised in Success. In it, 70s girls act like boys – swill pints, shag around, neglect their flats and appearances – while 70s boys swap grooming tips. “Posh girls,” one such specimen disconsolately squeaks, “they’re after one thing and one thing only.”

Vivid yet analytically shallow ­reversals of this sort find a place in The Pregnant Widow. Early on, there’s a riff on miniskirts, see-through blouses, knee-high patent leather boots “and all the other things you needed before you could act like a boy”. There’s also a good deal of chat about handjobs, boxes and so on: the dialogue of bookish, defensively cocky young men cracking wise among themselves, which was another of Amis’s 70s specialities. This time, though, there’s an enormous effort to put this behaviour in context, and the context isn’t limited to feminism. Nuclear anxieties, the postwar “economic miracle”, the fact of their not being called on – in contrast to parents and grandparents – to risk early death or widowhood: the narrator carefully threads all these into the book’s depiction of “the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers”. There’s also an ­effort to see things more squarely from the women’s point of view – not an ­altogether successful one, maybe, but an effort nonetheless.

What all this boils down to, for the first half or so of the book, is a weird, slow-moving sexual comedy set in a posh girl’s holiday castle in Italy. Keith – a short, chain-smoking would-be poet and orphaned adoptee brought up by academics – has been invited there for the summer with Lily, his down-to-earth, faintly mutinous and only reasonably attractive girlfriend. They’re guests of Scheherazade, Lily’s second-best friend, an upper-class English do-gooder. Having previously resembled “the girl who distinguished herself on the harpsichord, or clocked up five thousand miles for Meals on Wheels”, she has suddenly blossomed into an ­incendiary beauty with, we understand, beyond-incredible breasts. Also on the scene are Whittaker, an older, gay American; his boyfriend Amen (”pronounced Ahmun”), who’s Libyan and therefore – uh-oh – a Muslim; Gloria, Scheherazade’s brother’s uptight girlfriend; and Adriano, a tiny Italian toff. Most of them are 20 or thereabouts, and Scheherazade’s drippy boyfriend is away.

Cutting at intervals to an older, sadder, three-times-married Keith in 2003, and announcing at the start that he’ll have a life-alteringly traumatic sexual experience in 1970, the novel sets about asking the question: will Keith get to see Scheherazade’s breasts? Then, once he’s seen them, and the other characters have finished quizzing him about his response to this development, the question changes: will he manage to get his hands on them? A nice boy, not a natural schemer, Keith has brought a small library with him, and his studious reading for his degree course is used as a springboard for elaborate discussions of the parallels, or lack of them, between classic English novels and 70s mating rituals. Occasionally other characters drop by – notably a woman named Rita, who turns out to be such a fiercely liberated shagger that she has no time for love or even affection. (Amen’s veiled sister, Ruaa, is brought on to serve as a dialectical counterweight to this terrifying figure, bringing an end to one Islam-related thread.)

As all this slowly happens, there’s a growing sense that the reader is being asked to do too many things at once: to chuckle at the consciously puerile gags and over-literary running jokes, to nod along with the bulletins on ageing and baby-boomer sexual attitudes, and to attend solemnly to the busy surface of Amis’s later style. Unless you’re Christopher Hitchens, it’s not easy to sustain the correct mood for doing all three simultaneously, and it doesn’t help that Amis has expanded his repertoire of eccentric mannerisms. His Concise Oxford Dictionary has seen a lot of action (there are four etymologies in the first 50 pages, with at least 12 more to come), as has, I’d guess, his Oxford Book of English Verse. Above all, the need for each sentence to bear a heavy stylistic stamp often leads to such lines as “he insomniated by Lily’s side”, or “The clock, once in a blue moon, ticked. Or tocked. Or clocked. Or clicked, or clucked, or clacked.” This section - the main trunk of the novel - is stilted, fiddling and rarely funny.

Around 250 pages in, however, as Keith’s inept scheming builds to a catastrophe, the writing seems to relax a bit, collapsing the absurdly high diction into low comedy in more effective ways. It also starts to generate images reminiscent of the earlier, funnier Amis: “an extended dynasty of monogrammed leather suitcases”, for example. Then, after several narrative twists, the Italian holiday abruptly ends and the writer seems to embark on a different book. Narrating in fast-forward Keith’s sentimental education at the hands of a Nicola Six-like femme fatale in the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond, Amis jettisons the lumberingly intricate, glassily poised manner of the earlier sections, working up instead a kind of narrative fugue state not seen in his work for some time. Although not every­thing succeeds here, you get the feeling of a writer working at high pressure with combustibly personal material, scarcely bothering to disguise various real-life figures – his sister, Hitchens, the poet Ian Hamilton. It’s as though, having previously played only grace notes, he’s launched into a tune.

A hostile reading of The Pregnant Widow might be that it blames Keith’s moral quasi-degradation and failure as a poet on too close or too early an ­association with naughty ladies. A more sympathetic one would be that the novel portrays the 70s as the ground zero of a narcissistic baby-boomer culture that coarsened both sexes, a culture in which Amis’s writerly enterprise is implicated too. (The narrator resurrects TS Eliot’s notion of a “dissociation of sensibility” that cut thoughts off from feelings – a separation that’s often been diagnosed in Amis’s novels, not least by the narrator of The Rachel Papers.) There are fewer sage-like speeches on “universal” themes than in most of his recent fiction, and the minor character who functions as the book’s feminist superego also seems to indicate that the novelist has seen through at least some of the Eurabia-type stuff he espoused not long ago. Is it a “return to form”? Not exactly, but there’s plainly a regathering of artistic energies. It’s a “strange ride with the pregnant widow”, as the narrator says, and for stretches of it, the reader is happy to tag along.

With the death of JD Salinger last week, a remarkable era in US literature came to its end. Mark Lawson reflects on the passing of an unrivalled generation

January 27 is becoming a black-letter day in American literature. On that day in 2009, John Updike died and, this year, the first ­anniversary of that loss was marked by the news that JD Salinger was dead. It’s an artificial coincidence – of a sort that authors as good as Updike and Salinger would have scorned in their stories – but the deaths in close succession of members of the literary generations born in the 1910s, 20s and 30s do have a symbolic significance. If we add the deaths within four months of 2007 of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut – members with Salinger of the set of major American writers formed by service in the second world war – it’s clear that an era in American literature is coming to a close.

There is an obvious temptation to believe that the authors who have recently died form – with others who fought in the war (such as Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal) or were teenagers in America during it (Philip Roth) – the greatest literary generation the country has ever seen or ever will see. This triumphalist but nostalgic position holds that these writers took advantage of their nation’s geopolitical power – and a media culture and bookstore customer-base which regarded serious writers ­seriously – to create a superpower of the pen to match the financial and military clout of the US during what became known as the American century.

The counter-argument is that this army of old soldiers was very male and masculine and white in its concerns – tempered only by a grudging, late admission to the halls of fame of writers such as Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – and that the standard narrative of 20th-century American literature is partial and distorted. This case is made persuasively in Elaine Showalter’s recent book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

These contrasting presentations of recent American letters are explored in Capturing America, an eight-part Radio 4 series on which I’ve been working for several years. And – even before the death of Salinger during final editing – there had been melancholy signs that this was the right time to take stock. The programmes contain the final ­major interviews with Mailer, Vonnegut and Updike. The latter seemed healthy and energetic in the BBC’s New York studio in the autumn of 2008 as he discussed his life-time mission to write “an alphabet of novels”. But The Widows of Eastwick, three short of the intended 26 full-length fictions from this man of letters, became the last when he was diagnosed, just 10 days after our conversation (according to the dated poems in Endpoint, his final volume of verse) with the pneumonia that would lead to diagnosis of lung cancer and his death on the date that lay in wait for Salinger 12 months later. When I began to think about the series, the question of who was America’s greatest living novelist would spark lively debate at a book festival. On the eve of transmission, that medal automatically defaults to Philip Roth.

There were other signs that this was the right time to analyse Am lit. Updike, in that last interview, reflected on having twice been pictured on the cover of Time magazine, part of the nation’s honours system, to mark the publication of Couples in 1968 and Rabbit Is Rich in 1982. Now, the novelist who takes that prize is Dan Brown. And so the changing of the guard in American fiction is arguably not just generational but cultural: the large, interested readership who lined their shelves with Updike’s Rabbit Quartet, Bellow’s Herzog, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and other bestsellers of serious literary merit had perhaps migrated to the quick-read thriller and the confessional memoir.

Any overview is immediately subject to accusations of oversight which are followed just as inevitably by a defence of compression; but my definition of modern American literature concentrates on authors whose first work appeared after 1945, which was, in so many ways, a break-through date.

Roth, in The Plot Against America, imagines that a protectionist government prevented the US from entering the second world war when it did. But, if this had been historical reality, The Plot Against America is not the only major American novel we might now lack. The major American novelists of the middle years of the 20th century are all, in various ways, direct beneficiaries of their country’s involvement in that conflict.

Norman Mailer served in the 112th Cavalry in the Pacific theatre, where Gore Vidal, enlisted in the US Army Reserve, was master of a supply boat. Joseph Heller was a bombardier in the 12th Air Force and Kurt Vonnegut a private in the 106th Infantry Division. Jerome David Salinger, drafted into the 4th Infantry Division of the 12th Infantry Regiment, fought on D-Day. Saul Bellow, though Canadian by birth and older than the others, signed up for the Merchant Navy.

Apart from Salinger, this squadron of future novelists saw little military action – Mailer was mainly utilised as a cook and Vonnegut rapidly became a prisoner of war – but all had found material for stories. Indeed, Mailer was clear that he had joined the army with the hope of writing the novel that became The Naked and the Dead (1948). Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, drew on the war period, while Vidal’s experiences at sea gave him the title for a volume of memoirs – Point to Point Navigation – and a combatant’s jaundiced perspective which informed his long sequence of historical novels about the growth of American military ambition: Chronicles of Empire.

But the 1939-45 conflict (1941-45, in American terms) was not just a compelling subject for the country’s writers; it was, for some, a passport to authorship. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (colloquially known as the GI Bill) was almost voted down by the nation’s politicians – opponents citing anti-socialist objections similar to those afflicting Obama’s healthcare proposals now – but it transformed the nation’s education. Before this legislation, the level of college fees largely restricted entry to the children of the wealthy but a provision in the GI Bill to fund the studies of veterans democratised teaching. By 1947, just under half of undergraduates were recipients of this generosity.

Among them were Mailer and Bellow – who wrote early novels in Paris, courtesy of servicemen readjustment grants – and Heller and Vonnegut. Towards the end of his life – when we spoke in New York– Vonnegut had not forgotten the lucky consequences of war service for himself and others of his generation: “Heller and I would have been washing machine salesmen if it wasn’t for the GI Bill.”

The greatest of the novels that this legislation enabled Heller and Vonnegut to write are striking examples of the centrality of war to modern US literature. Both writers took two decades to turn their experience of conflict – Heller in the belly of bomber planes, Vonnegut as a PoW during the fire-bombing of Dresden – into books which, coincidentally, turned tragic events into savage comedy and had numbers in their name: Catch-22 (1962) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Because of their lengthy gestation, these novels accidentally became handbooks of the anti-Vietnam protesters, and this is a striking example of the overlaps that tend to occur in America’s literature of conflict.

The same authors inspired and educated by the second world war remained involved – on the page at least – in subsequent 20th-century battles. Mailer published the polemic Why Are We in Vietnam? and The ­Armies of the Night, an account of a great anti-Vietnam march on Washington which records the literary odd couple he formed in that protest with Robert Lowell, the poet who had been imprisoned for conscientious objection during the war in Europe. And, in his final years, Mailer railed – as did his contemporary, Vonnegut – against the last American military intervention of their lifetimes: the invasion of Iraq. The latter, in A Man Without a Country, as a German-American once incarcerated in Dresden, even compared the administration of George W Bush to the Nazis.

During Vietnam, a Lowell poem predicted that America would be involved in “small war on the heels of small war, until the end of time”. And, though we hopefully still have some time to go, this has so far proved accurate. A nation established by victory over the British – and, within a century, almost split by civil conflict – developed, after its unarguable role as the saviour of ­Europe, a doctrine of allegedly defensive interventions overseas which turned its authors into war reporters.

Even those who were teenagers during the second world war have contributed to the conflict literature: Roth, in The War Against America; John Updike in Terrorist; and EL Doctorow who, during the Bush years, published The March (a civil war novel) and Homer and Langley, set in the early 40s but in which the accounts of GIs sending home recordings to their families inevitably made us think of current troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stories of one war that clips at the heels of another.

And, in recent US history, definitions of peacetime have been relative: violent divisions over race, place and wealth – some of them dating from the civil war – have meant that even non-war stories are often conflict literature. The critic Harold Bloom told me that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) – in which the wounds of the 19th century bleed copiously – has some claim to be the greatest modern American novel because it deals with the nation’s deep tendency to violence. Bloom’s view has perhaps recently been vindicated by the growing sense (helped by high-profile movies of No Country for Old Men and The Road) that McCarthy is now the country’s most fashionable serious writer – although the 76-year-old from Rhode Island, who latterly adopted Texas as his home and literary location – has done almost nothing to encourage that popularity.

One of the major pleasures of my long investigation of American writing was meeting writers who have been heroes since I read as a teenager the Penguins and Picadors which – now yellowed and buckled – became research material 30 years later. Time and again, the jacket photographs miraculously came to life.

Norman Mailer, standing in greeting at the top of his tall house in Brooklyn Heights, with its view to the Statue of Liberty, and growling, in a perfect parody of his reputation for obsession with masculinity: “You’re a big man. Do you box? You should box.” Philip Roth skittish and wickedly jokey as the technical preparations were made, sombre and professorial as soon as the interviews began. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most vociferous writers in literary history (around 150 publications, including all pseudonyms and genres), so softly spoken in a Princeton University office that she could hardly be heard over the purr of the heating. Toni Morrison, giving a magisterial reading and analysis of America on the brink of electing Obama. John Updike, arriving at a snowy Boston hotel, wearing a black knitted cap and clutching a Dunkin Donuts cup of decaf coffee.

And just hearing these voices was a kind of literary criticism. The theatre director Sir Peter Hall once said that if you want to know how a play should sound on stage, you should listen to the playwright speaking, because the tone of authors’ prose or dialogue will generally reflect their speech patterns. And I thought of that as Edward Albee – on a summer day in a Soho loft filled with an impressive art collection made possible by the royalties from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Three Tall Women and The Goat – delivered witty, twinkly, stinging sentences about his plays and his critics.

In this odd position of having coffee with set-texts, I also often thought of the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye who comments that a good story makes you want to get the author on the telephone and talk to him. But, as Salinger possibly realised with a quiet laugh even in 1951, the writer of those lines was among the few, in an age of strenuous literary publicity, from whom we never heard.

The paradox of Am lit is that it is notable for possessing both the most publicity-conscious writers in literary history – Mailer had an eye for photo-ops generally only found in reality TV contestants – and the most publicity-shy. Salinger refused interviews and public appearances throughout his career, an example followed by Harper Lee and Thomas Pynchon.

For decades, the only pictures of Salinger and Pynchon were school yearbook photos, captured before they took their vows of invisibility. Eventually, the Salinger gallery extended to two exhibits, when a paparazzo snapped him on an errand. Don DeLillo – who featured a reclusive writer in his novel Mao II – told me that this image of a startled old man looking over his shoulder at the shutter-click he had for so long avoided is one of the most upsetting he has ever seen. But that – as the illustrations to the obituary coverage showed – did not stop a couple of other cameras subsequently snapping him.

Perhaps the reason for this Mailer/Salinger dichotomy – one happy to run for public office, the other running from the clicking shutter – is that literary fame in the US is potentially so vast that responses need to be extreme: absolute promiscuity, total celibacy. Those who have tried to take a middle path of occasional cooperation – Roth, McCarthy – have suffered intrusive coverage and unwanted attention.

The level of visibility that a major writer is offered may be one explanation for the centrality of the self in modern American literature. Mailer, in a literary equivalent of a conversational tactic pioneered by sportsmen, frequently wrote about himself in the surname third-person, a tactic which can be seen as ego but which may also have acknowledged the increasing impossibility, in a time of furious curiosity about writers, of the observing character being a neutral “I”.

In a similar strategy, Roth and Updike responded to the increasingly looming presence of the alter ego who was out there selling the books – and, often, being described and reviewed as brutally as the novels – by summoning up fictional surrogates.

Roth (Nathan Zuckerman), Updike (Henry Bech) – these novelists like to write about writers. Vonnegut’s characters included a science fiction author called Kilgore Trout, who feels like a self-portrait, and three of the major novels of John Irving – The World According to Garp, A Widow for One Year and Last Night in Twisted River – have protagonists who are novelists. These authorial stand-ins can be viewed as self-indulgence but a more charitable interpretation would be that they are self-protection against the energetic efforts, in American letters, to appropriate a writer’s identity.

Bellow, although offering no authorly surrogate as openly declared as Zuckerman or Bech, seems to have been a routinely autobiographical writer, once describing each of his novels as “a bulletin on my own condition”. Fairly typically, when Bellow left the university where he was teaching for Bucharest, to visit the mother of his then wife, the result was The Dean’s December (1982), in which an American academic takes a trip to see his mother-in-law in Romania. The story also incorporates, flimsily rewritten, two actual murders that had occurred contemporaneously in his home city of Chicago.

Such direct memoir is often seen as a weakness in fiction: “All the men are Saul and the women are the wives” has been a frequent complaint against Bellow’s novels; Harold Bloom made a version of it when we met. But we only know because we know; if Bellow had done a Pynchon or Salinger, we might have taken the events in Bucharest as vivid imagination. And so one of the consequences of the industrialisation of publicity in the US book business has been to expose the origins of novels in a way that can then be turned against them.

Many of the ­nation’s ­poets, however, have willingly participated in this striptease, without apparent misgivings. At least Bellow’s bulletins on his own condition changed the names and occasional details. The output of a group of New England ­poets – Lowell (1917-1977), Sylvia Plath (1932-63) and Anne Sexton (1928-74) – perfected the genre of “confessional” verse, in which the life (and, in the cases of Plath and Sexton, likely future death by suicide) frequently seems to undergo little change beyond rhythmic shaping to fit the lines.

This verse was often literally therapeutic – Lowell, Plath and Sexton were all treated at the same psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts – but began a debate about whether the genre should sometimes be subject to an equivalent of medical confidentiality. Lowell – in Notebook (1969) and The Dolphin (1973) – quoted directly from the letters of an ex-wife. Whether or not this was ethical, it was true to two increasingly important ideas in American culture during this period: the primacy of the self and a prejudice that fact had more validity than fiction.

Those perceptions also drove an influential new genre which emerged at the same time as confessional poetry: the new journalism. Tom Wolfe (born in 1931) and Hunter S Thompson (1937-2005) overturned two well-cemented tenets of American journalism – the reporter as a discreet, objective presence, and a reverence for fact over opinion – to create a new strain of factual narrative in which the reporter is a star of the story. Books such as Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) introduced the devices of fiction to journalism and would eventually encourage the same development in reverse.

Perhaps conscious that arguably the finest work of new journalism had been written by a novelist – Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980), which recreated, in visceral physical and psychological detail, the life of the murderer Gary Gilmore – Wolfe responded, within a decade, by producing the finest novel written by a new journalist: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). In promoting this book, he also provoked a long-running and entertaining feud with career novelists – including the New England Johns, Irving and Updike – by suggesting that their work was insufficiently observant of the real world.

This energising slippage between fact and fiction continues in the work of two of the most exciting talents of the new generation: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), published as fiction, and A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) by Dave Eggers, released as non-fiction, are both genre-crossing family memoirs that combine agonising truth with storytelling tricks and have unreliable narrators with the author’s own name. True to one of the key developments in modern American writing, ­Safran Foer and Eggers achieved literary celebrity through first books that acted as though they already had it.

The ambition of the nation’s prose writers is a commonplace of American literary studies: the idea that its ­authors are competing to compose the great American novel. But this contest is probably a myth – wasn’t it won, as early as 1851, by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? A different source of extraordinary boldness and scope is American theatre.

Between the eve of the second world war and the beginning of the 1960s, a series of plays appeared which revolutionised American drama: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) by Albee. Each of these dramas is set predominantly within a domestic residence of its era and has a surface of realism; each has become a standard of the classroom and the provincial theatre repertoire, with the stamp of conservatism that such endorsements inevitably bring.

Yet all of these plays contain significant non-naturalistic or experimental elements: dream sequences or flashes forward or back. Seeing Our Town last year – in the acclaimed off-Broadway revival by David Cromer for the Barrow Street Theatre – I was startled by the darkness and strangeness, in both structure and tone, of a script which I remembered as a linear hymn to small-town life. No sooner are characters introduced than the audience is told of when and how they will die horribly; an entire act takes place in a graveyard filled with people looking back on unfulfilled lives.

British theatre did not achieve a radical change in content and form until the 50s and 60s – driven first by John Osborne’s stable-cleansing Look Back in Anger and then the abolition of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office – but the equivalent breakthrough in the playhouses of the US occurred at least a decade and a half earlier.

It is also notable that America’s dramatists, though the mecca of their profession has always been the commercial stages of Broadway, consistently questioned the optimistic rhetoric of politicians and businessmen about the supremacy of its way of living. The dominant figure of postwar American drama is the fantasist or liar with a life which is in some way unsustainable: Miller’s Willy Loman, Williams’s Blanche DuBois, Albee’s George and Martha.

This radicalism of tone and structure continued among the younger generation of dramatists. Though the leader of the new pack is a minimalist – David Mamet, whose plays, including American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, rarely detain the audience beyond two hours – US stages still spawn plays of a scale more commonly associated with multi-episode television serials.

Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992) runs, across its two parts, for around six hours and, as its subtitle (”A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”) makes clear, follows those pioneering plays of the immediate postwar period in mixing the naturalistic with the non-realistic and even the supernatural. So too does August Wilson’s The Pittsburgh Cycle (1982-2005), which has an architecture even larger than Kushner’s: 10 plays, each dealing with a different decade of African-American history in the 20th century. Wilson also moved freely between fact and fantasy: his characters include a 322-year-old woman.

The most recent serious play to become a box-office hit on Broadway – August: Osage County (2007) by Tracy Letts – is another of these daring constructs: a three-act, three-hour-plus attempt to show that domestic tragedy can still be written in an ironic age. Though working within a system that worships commerce – Miller, Williams and Albee all suffered spells of neglect in which they were grateful for subsidised theatre in the UK – American playwrights have, when it comes to form and politics, consistently dared to go for broke.

Writers are frequently seen as being unworldly figures, but, as it turns out, the White House and the CIA would have been better prepared for 9/11 if they had read American novelists and dramatists rather than field reports. After the attacks, the intelligence community reportedly consulted Hollywood screenwriters about likely future threats, having spotted that movies such as Die Hard anticipated the methods and level of terrorist threat to the US, but they might just as fruitfully have called in DeLillo, Charles McCarry and Kushner.

DeLillo’s most resonant books so far have examined the politics of the American past – Libra (1981), about the JFK assassination and Underworld (1997), exploring the cold war era – but his earlier fiction proves to have been percipient. Though the threat of terrorism entered general consciousness in the US only after 9/11, it figured in DeLillo’s work from the 70s, an insight he attributed to having lived in Greece.

McCarry is a former servant of the secret world – working as a CIA agent under deep cover in Asia and the Middle East during the cold war – who now has some claim to be the best-kept secret on the great American writers shelf. His The Tears of Autumn (1974) is one of the three best literary explorations of the JFK assassination – the others are Libra and Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) – and the one which perhaps explains most plausibly what happened.

Though far less well known than John le Carré, McCarry has been just as geopolitically aware and is the writer who came closest to directly predicting the 11 September attacks. His book The Better Angels (1979) includes suicide bombers sending planes against America, directed by an Arab malcontent whom contemporary readers will inevitably visualise as Osama bin Laden. Kushner’s play Homebody/ ­Kabul (2001), written before the attacks, includes an Afghan character warning Americans that the Taliban are “coming to New York”.

In the interviews they gave at what turned out to be, in too many cases, the end of their lives, the great fictionalists of the US were almost uniformly gloomy about the future of serious writing. Mailer and Updike detected the retreat of a readership for complex stories. Among living practitioners, Albee feared that Broadway ticket prices mean that only sentimentality and spectacle can sell, complaining of the “middlebrowism that is afflicting American theatre because it is a commercial theatre”.

Roth was also concerned about a coarsening of culture: “The population of intelligent, attentive readers capable of concentration and focus of the kind that is required by a serious novel . . . has decreased. Not because there aren’t the same number of intelligent people around but because they have been torn away like Lady Macbeth says she tore away the child from her breast. They have been torn away from the breast of literature by the screen.”

Vidal, with characteristic dyspepsia, argued that America cannot have suffered a cultural decline because “we never had a culture”, but accepted that his earlier work was published at a more receptive time: “The attention of readers has shifted away . . . it feels to me very much like a dying moment for literary culture in my country.”

The history of sport, though, warns us that the great players of the past are prone to believing that the finest achievements belonged to their own era and will not be bettered by the disappointing generation which follows.

A more optimistic reading is that intelligent literary culture will adapt to the new conditions of the marketplace and may be revived, as the country always has been, by immigration. The Jewish-American, Irish-American, ­African-American and European-­American writers of the great postwar generations may be followed by authors who are, say, Indian-American (Jhumpa Lahiri, left, with Unaccustomed Earth), Dominican-American (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) or Korean-American (Chang-rae Lee, whose novel The Surrendered, published this spring, extends the nation’s rich war literature by treating the ­Korean war from an Asian perspective). With these books and others, a new phase is beginning.

Capturing America begins on Radio 4 on 11 February at 11.30am. To listen to Mark Lawson’s interviews with American writers visit bbc.co.uk/radio4/

Vintage, £7.99

Looking out over Lyme Bay in 1867, a telescopist might have noticed a well dressed couple walking along the Cobb and correctly inferred they were were a well-to-do couple from out of town who were shortly to be wed. But he would have been at all at sea with the motionless woman standing at the end of the mole clad all in black.

“I hope you haven’t been talking about the silly ideas of Mr Darwin again,” Ernestina chided. “Papa so hates the idea of being descended from an ape.”

Indeed Charles had been talking of just that, for what self-respecting free-thinking man would have talked of anything else. Just as today such a man might talk of DNA, the Cold war and the right to self-determination.

Yet the reality is that Charles has no right to self-determination, as he is but the construct of my imagination, so let us now make him catch sight of the woman at the end of the Cobb.

“Who, pray, is that?” he asks.

“They call her the French Lieutenant’s Woman,” Ernestina replies. “She fell in love with a shipwrecked captain who abandoned her. She is quite disgraced and is now a servant to Mrs Poulteney.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me such a horrible story, but we must escort her back to Lyme for she is not safe here.”

Charles made to counsel the woman’s but her eyes warned him off, eyes that betrayed a sorrow as deep as the sea.

But as this is my book, let’s leave this introductory scene and make some wry observations about both the characters and their Victorian values. Charles Smithson, we may conclude, is a man of moderate virtue. Freed by a private income from the necessity of work, he is a lost soul of 32 years, passing his time before claiming the greater inheritance from his uncle by hunting for fossils, and tortured by memories of his liaisons with prostitutes.

His fiancée, Miss Ernestina Freeman, is what we would now in the 1960s call petit-bourgeois. In short her father is in trade. But what trade! If you will excuse the overuse of exclamation marks! He owns department stores in London and is a man of considerable self-made wealth and his only daughter a worthy catch for a man, such as Charles, of greater class but fewer means. Ernestina’s only drawback is that she is, as we now say in 2010, a bit of an airhead.

Miss Sarah Woodruff, or the French Lieutenant’s Hoo-er as some Lyme Regis folk described her, we will come to shortly; the other minor characters need not detain us greatly. There is Mrs Poulteney, a widow who has taken in Miss Woodruff to offset her bigotry and increase her chances of entering the kingdom of heaven.

And then there’s Sam and Mary. How sweet the lower orders are in love! And how little they appear to dissemble compared to the romantic contortions of their masters! For Mary is the maid to Ernestina’s aunt and Sam is Charles’s man. Such a useful contrast for the novelist! Yet do not underestimate the Crafty Cockney’s ability to put one over on his master!

We could also spend many pages discussing Victorian society from a modern perspective, with recourse to such imagery as computers, but first I would like to talk again of me. It’s tough being a novelist in the 60s, unsure if your characters exist and wanting to pretend you aren’t really controlling their story. Yawn.

Enough of this. Now to the Undercliff, that secret prehistoric world of vaginal fecundity where Miss Woodruff walks alone. And where Charles is searching for a fossil.

“Miss Woodruff,” he says.

“Mr Smithson,” she replies.

Dark passions begin to simmer.

“I worry for your health.”

“My health means nothing,” she declares. “I know the French Lieutenant will never return, but the shame I bear defines me.”

Had he been born 100 years later, Charles might have recognised this as an expression of Sartrean existential angst. Instead, he felt a disconcerting swelling in his trousers and kissed her on the eyelid.

Miss Woodruff looked back, her long red curls swept from her alabaster forehead by the wind machine situated behind the director. “If we are seen together I shall be expelled from Mrs Poulteney’s service.”

I could make more of this rather slender, contrived courtship. I could discourse longer on Victorian science and religious hypocrisy. I could begin a sub-plot where Charles is left rudderless by his uncle’s marriage to a fortune hunter, a union that diminishes his prospects yet leaves him with the opportunity to terminate his betrothal to Ernestina with a patina of probity. I could arrange further portentous encounters between Charles and Sarah one of which could end by Sarah deliberately allowing herself to be observed and thus fulfil her Freudian need to be expelled from Mrs Poulteney’s home.

Yet in this process of digestion I prefer to cut to the chase, so let’s take ourselves to Exeter where Sarah is staying at Endicott’s hotel. Here I have a dilemma, for I must maintain the artifice that my characters have their own lives and I don’t know how the story ends. Daringly, then, I leave you two.

First we have Charles denying himself the fulfilment of a night with Sarah and returning to Ernestina, with whom he will live happily ever after for the next 173 years. But I don’t want to do that. So let’s also find Charles collapsing on Sarah’s naked body after 17 seconds of intense copulation.

“My God, but you were a virgin,” Charles cries. “So the French Lieutenant did not… “

“Indeed not, but I needed the world to imagine I had for me to explore my shame and loneliness and prepare myself for you.”

Had Charles read any modern psychology books he would have realised Sarah was a nutter in need of therapy. But as this was 1867 he merely says, “I adore you.”

Oh dear. The complications increase. See how Sam fails to deliver Charles’s letter to Sarah and their romance is snuffed out before it barely began. See how Charles is ostracised for ending his engagement and forced to wander the world like the Flying Dutchman reading Tennyson, sleeping with prostitutes and mixing metaphors in his search for Sarah.

If only I’d known how messy it was going to get, how I was making myself write another 100 unnecessary pages, I might have stuck with the first ending. But I didn’t. So now I must leave you another two as Charles finishes a love poem. I weep and weep, I’m very deep / I yearn to sleep with Meryl Streep.

He finds her two years later, living as Rosetti’s muse. “I cannot marry you. I still want to be alone. But we have a daughter,” Sarah says.

Or.

“I will marry you, but it’s only Platonic.”

You’ll probably choose the second. Readers always think the last more real. In truth they are the same. Either way, Charles and Sarah have ended up in a post-modern cul-de-sac.

As his 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow, comes out, he admits he fears his decline as a writer and is still wounded by the critics

Martin Amis is the most argued over novelist in the UK, largely, I suspect, because hardly anyone reads him. I bumped into my neighbour, a cultured fellow, a few days after interviewing Amis and asked him what he thought of his work. He had read one of his books years ago – couldn’t remember what, didn’t like it – but he’d heard all about the row, running hotly last week, sparked by Amis’s suggestion that the “silver tsunami” of decrepit and deranged old people should be killed off. Thus does Amis the controversialist obscure Amis the writer, who is now 60 and this week publishes his 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow.

Amis lives in a large, but not ostentatious, house in a writerly part of north London, which he shares with his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and young daughters Fernanda and Clio. His father, Kingsley, once had a house – shared, at the alcohol-fuelled end of his life, with his first wife (Amis’s mother), the saintly Hilly, and her third husband, the late Lord Kilmarnock – in the same street.

When I arrive, Amis has a glass of lager in his hand and gets one for me, too. The photographer is just setting up, and I’m surprised by his coldness towards her: maybe he has been photographed too many times. All he asks – their non-relationship is over in a flash – is that she doesn’t photograph him leaning backwards as that makes him look pompous. To me he is charming, politely passing over my misunderstandings of his new book.

He drawls and tends to talk in fragments, chunks of thought; he describes the hoopla that surrounds publishing a book as “epiphenomena”. What are we to make of his nightmare vision of the “silver tsunami”? “There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops,” he said last week. His solution? “There should be a [euthanasia] booth on every street corner where you could get a Martini and a medal.” You can now, on Google, find 137,000 items referencing Amis + euthanasia. Yet it was, he admitted as the storm gathered force, “satirical”.

Amis is at heart, as he readily admits, a comic novelist, and he is something of a comic controversialist. “It’s the way these things are picked up,” he says when I chide him for provoking the sort of media storm which he spent the 90s – when the state of his teeth and his falling out with former friend Julian Barnes were the principal literary talking points – berating. “You never get the context. But I don’t want to tread carefully and be editing myself. It wasn’t an attack on the old – I’m not that far from it myself – and I was skating over the legal complexities, but I stick by my basic point: you need to have a means to end your life.”

Read the description in his memoir Experience of Kingsley’s final years, and you will understand Amis’s dread. He recalls his intellectually annihilated father sitting at his typewriter, typing the word “seagulls”, over and over. He fears his own decline as a writer. “I’ve talked to Ian McEwan about this. Our fallback position is going to be that you write short stuff.”

Amis began The Pregnant Widow soon after publication of the critically mauled novel Yellow Dog in 2003. He saw the new book as a big one and described it as “blindingly auto- biographical”. “The novel was an awful struggle,” he says. “I struggled with it for four years. The first 100 pages seemed all right, they seemed to work, but it was only working because of novelistic contrivance, not because it was my story. I realised the Easter before last – in Uruguay [Fonseca is half-Uruguayan], where we were on holiday – that it wasn’t working. I read on and I thought this is completely dead, it’s inert. I had a terrible couple of weeks, then tiptoed back to it and realised it was two books.”

He set about separating them. Here, he has written a book with a great deal of sex (or at least conspiring to have sex) and a little literature; the second book – still several years away and to be preceded by a short, satirical novel called State of England – will have a lot of literature and a little sex. Sex and literature, it is fair to say, have been Amis’s key interests, though the order of importance has fluctuated over the years.

He claims to have taken most of the autobiography out of The Pregnant Widow, but will anyone believe him? Private Eye certainly doesn’t. In a wickedly funny spoof in the current issue, it identifies the central character Keith with Mart, and for good measure hopes that one day he might write a novel that is vaguely plausible. Meanwhile, the Telegraph has gone in search of Gloria Beautyman, the sexually voracious woman with “pincers of bliss” who traumatises Keith in the shared bathroom of the Italian castle in which his characters spend a steamy summer in 1970. The paper offers a string of early Amis girlfriends as contenders, including Tina Brown, Emma Soames, Julie Kavanagh and Angela Gorgas. Amis rejects such literalism. “That’s the crudest way to read these things, but I invited it by saying the book was going to be blindingly autobiographical. Born in 1949, five foot six and a half, but that’s it: I’ve just given Keith my height and my birthday. And my sister.”

His sister being Sally, an alcoholic who died in 2000 at the age of 46, and who was, in a brutal phrase Amis applied to her last year, “pathologically promiscuous”. In The Pregnant Widow, she is reborn as Keith’s younger sister Violet: damaged, habitually drinking, forever in hopeless, violent relationships. Amis has talked of Sally as a victim of the sexual liberation of the 60s, but his mother has since distanced herself from that view and he now seems to accept it is too simplistic. “My sister would have struggled in any society,” he tells me. “All the sexual revolution did to her fate was to give it a peculiar setting and style.”

Does he feel he failed her? “Yeah, up to a point. I should have put in more hours; that’s what I feel. My brother [Philip, an artist, a year older than Amis] put in more than me; my mother put in infinitely more than me; and my father really depended on her in the last years. But she never responded at all to anything really. It was nice to give her money and to get her out of certain jams and patch her up every now and then, but there was no indication that anything other than devoting your entire life to it would have made any difference.”

Amis suspects the book will be attacked by feminists, for suggesting that the sexual revolution made women act in ways contrary to their nature, turning them into boys, cocks (the novel’s favourite word for new women), narcissists. Yet he insists he has written a feminist book. “I’ve been a passionate feminist since the mid-80s,” he says. “It was Gloria Steinem who converted me in a single day in New York. It’s the rhetorical device she uses throughout, and it’s very effective: she just reverses the sexes – what if men menstruated, what if men had babies? It’s unanswerable.”

What he is interested in is a “decent deal” between men and women. Before the 60s women were largely second-class citizens, confined to the home; then they were liberated, economically and sexually – a revolution that produced many gains and some losses. “All the difficult choices fell to women,” he says. “Boys didn’t have to change. They were only furtively aware that change was taking place and wondering how it was going to go. But women did have a difficult passage. There was the equalitarian phase, which is what is happening in the book, where boys and girls are the same – that was the ridiculous orthodoxy. But I think girls had no other model than boys, so they started to behave like boys, and still are. Some coped and others didn’t, because their hearts weren’t in it.”

Keith meets a hard-playing character called Rita four decades after the hedonistic summer of 1970, and asks her whether she had the 10 children she’d envisaged. She says, “I sort of forgot to,” then starts to weep. Amis says that among women of his generation, “There were plenty of Ritas who put the emphasis so much on recreation that they didn’t get married and didn’t have children. They used themselves up a bit, and sensationally so with Violet. People say, ‘You weren’t aware of this at the time,’ but you were. There was a sense of unreality that this was being allowed to happen.” He is, though, at pains to say he is not attacking the 60s, the sexual revolution or the emancipation of women. Rather, he is pointing out that all revolutions proceed in stages and produce victims.

Untangling fact and fiction in The Pregnant Widow will keep literary sleuths happy for months. Amis’s great friend and former flatmate Rob Henderson, who eventually ended up in prison and died in 2002, is memorialised as Kenrik, Keith’s beautiful, unschooled, amoral alter ego. The poet Ian Hamilton becomes Neil Darlington. There are many echoes of the fictional Keith’s life in Amis’s memoir, which was published in 2000. So is it autobiography or isn’t it? “The only autobiographical figures are now all dead,” insists Amis. “That became the rule.” Is Keith what Amis would have become if he’d stayed at ad agency J Walter Thompson, where he worked for a while after getting a first in English at Oxford, instead of embarking on a literary career? Keith, a would-be poet, does the opposite, opting for advertising and instant liquidity instead. “There’s a little bit of that,” says Amis reluctantly.

Why, having trawled his life so movingly in Experience – his parents’ divorce, the death of his father, the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington had been a victim of Fred West – had he wanted to return to the subject in fictional form? Amis talks about the “thickening out” of life that comes after 50 – “there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being,” he says in The Pregnant Widow, “like an undiscovered continent.” He was eager to plot a course across it. “I thought there might be a fictional way through it too, but it was a great mistake,” he says. “John Banville [the Booker prize-winning novelist] told me it was impossible, and it was.” Except that, for all Amis’s protestations, what has appeared draws closely on his life. Private Eye’s spoof is funny because it contains a truth.

The abiding image of Amis is the thick-lipped, cigarette-dangling literary bad boy – the Mick Jagger of fiction. But read Experience and you feel his vulnerability. He describes how he felt at Lucy Partington’s memorial service in the summer of 1994. “I had never experienced misery and inspiration so purely combined. My body consisted only of my heart.” In The Pregnant Widow, Keith fails as a poet because he cannot connect thought and emotion; the “joke decade” of the 70s had obliterated feeling. Amis is fascinated by the way he has changed since what he admits was a midlife crisis in the early 90s. At its simplest, he has discovered the purity of love, love without ego – the essence of that “transfiguring experience” at his cousin’s memorial service. Women, trophies to the early Amis, have become redeemers.

Today Amis seems gloriously, almost uxoriously happy with Fonseca, mirroring the joy Keith eventually finds with his third wife Conchita. While I am talking to him, his daughters arrive, knock at the lounge door and proudly bring in a new kitten to show him, carrying their prize in a white sheet. The interruption lasts only a few minutes – they are polite young girls, American accented, entering teenagehood – but I like the reminder that even grand writers have consuming home lives. The litter tray in the hall.

It is his second marriage. The first, to Antonia Phillips, with whom he had two sons (now in their mid-20s), ended in 1993. He also has a daughter Delilah, who was born following a brief affair with Lamorna Seale in 1974 and with whom he had no contact until she was 19. Delilah had a son in 2008, making Amis a grandfather – “so uncool”, he complains. He is also now in contact with Sally’s daughter, Catherine, who was adopted when very young because Sally was incapable of looking after her. Amis’s life is denser than any of his novels could hope to be.

The Bookseller describes The Pregnant Woman as “a return to form”, as if Amis was left-back for Doncaster Rovers. “What’s this return shit? He never went away,” he says defiantly. “Return to form will become a kind of slogan, unless it goes the other way and they say ‘further spiral of decline’.” Rise above it, I tell him. “I’m sick of rising above it. I’ve had to do so much rising above it.”

You would think, by now, he wouldn’t care about critics, public approval, his lack of recognition from Booker prize committees, but boy does he care. He calls the panning of Yellow Dog “souring” and likens it to “having flu for a week”. When I allude to novelist Tibor Fischer’s notorious attack on the book – “Yellow Dog isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where-to-look bad . . . It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating” – Amis’s anger is evident. “All Tibor Fischer did, fat-arsed Tibor, was establish that you could say absolutely anything you liked about this book. It wasn’t just reviewed. Anyone who could hold a pen was having a go. I’d be surprised if there was another Yellow Dog moment in my life.”

Amis says that in the 90s he became “the one you can say anything about”. His divorce, the switch from long-time agent Pat Kavanagh to New York-based Andrew “the Jackal” Wylie, the consequent bust-up with Kavanagh’s husband Julian Barnes, and the huge advance for The Information (supposedly to pay for his troublesome teeth) combined to turn him into a literary celebrity, a target to knock down. His fascination with 9/11 and willingness to weigh into arguments over terrorism – in 2006 he foolishly told the Times, “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order” – further celebritised and controversialised him. Why has he returned so often to 9/11? “I never expected an event of that size to happen in my lifetime,” he says. He sees Islamism as a form of tyranny, akin to the Nazism he dissected in Time’s Arrow and the Stalinism he attacked in Koba the Dread. He has been accused of shifting to the right (”turning into his father” is how his critics see it), but he denies it, saying that the way he describes himself in Experience – “libertarian left of centre” – remains accurate.

Sometimes, when he wades into controversies, he generates more heat than light, but it may be a function of what he sees as the democratic role of the novelist. “I’m more and more struck by how different the novelist and the poet are,” he says. “Look at Auden’s sonnet, The Novelist. Poets can ‘dash forward like hussars’, but the work of the novelist is to be with the boring, the ugly, the filthy. In your person, as best you can, you comprehend all the wrongs of man. You have to be a sort of everyman to be a novelist, and poets are never everymen.” Did Amis, like his father, ever write poetry? “I wrote and published a couple of poems. Whenever he considered I was too big for my boots, Kingsley would say, ‘I don’t seem to see your first book of poems. I look but it isn’t there; it’s very puzzling.’ “

• The Pregnant Widow is published by Jonathan Cape, price £18.99. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

From Mrs Dashwood to the Wicked Queen, the novelist considers one of the culture’s most traduced figures

Sam Baker has edited some of Britain’s bestselling magazines, including Company, Cosmopolitan and currently, Red. She published her first novel, Fashion Victim, in 2005, and a second, This Year’s Model, followed in 2008. The Stepmother’s Support Group, her third, is published this week in paperback.

She lives between Winchester, Hampshire and central London with her husband and grown-up stepson.

Buy Sam Baker books at the Guardian bookshop

“Stepmothers get what can only be called a “bum rap” in literature. From Snow White and Cinderella to Tolstoy to Judy Blume, whenever fiction needs a character to pin it on a stepmother comes in handy. Euripedes didn’t help our cause when he wrote, “Better a serpent than a stepmother”. And it’s pretty much been that way since, with stepmothers pitted, in the main, against their stepdaughters, to create stories of two women battling for one man’s attention.

“There aren’t many positive role models, and often you need to dig below the surface, finding characters whose “stepmother-ness” is incidental. That’s why I wanted to rehabilitate stepmothers, and made my characters in The Stepmothers’ Support Group many things to many people – friends, professionals, lovers, confidantes… Stepmothering is just one of their tasks, and some of them are even good at it! Here are my favourite fictional stepmothers – some good, some very bad, and some downright put upon.”

1. The Wicked Queen in Snow White by the Brothers Grimm

Hardly a positive role model, but I can’t omit the mummy of them all. The wicked queen in Snow White is the baddest of all. But don’t worry, the Brothers Grimm made sure she got her comeuppance. In their original, which has since been sanitised for our more sensitive constitutions, the queen attends Snow White’s wedding, ignorant of the bride’s identity. During the after-dinner speeches, the prince relates their “meet-cute” and realisation dawns. As she attempts to make a break for it, the queen is stopped by guards, who have some handily heated iron shoes. They force these onto the queen’s feet and the wedding party watches as she dances herself to death. Nice.

2. Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

As light of touch as ever, Austen gave us the anti-Cinderella story in the form of Mrs Dashwood. The antithesis of the Wicked Queen, she is cruelly wronged when Mr Dashwood dies and, in keeping with the property laws of his time, he leaves everything to his son from his first marriage. Far from being the baddie, Mrs Dashwood and her daughters fall victim to an avaricious daughter-in-law, who sees to it, despite her husband’s deathbed promise to his father that he would look after his stepmother and sisters, the rivals are out on their ear by Friday. Was Austen trying to tell us something? Undoubtedly.

3. Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

Blink and you’ll miss the fact that Holly Golightly is a stepmother at all. But before she was the responsibility-free Holly, the still teenage Lula Mae hot-footed it away from Texas, her marriage to Doc Golightly and her role as mother to his children. A theme, for Capote, perhaps, whose sharp-tongued stepmother Amy appears in his semi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms.

4. Edith Grainger in Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

This book should be renamed Stepmother & Daughter. It is not Dombey or his son who sit at the book’s emotional core, but the love between his neglected daughter, Florence, and her stepmother, Edith. A rarity in fiction, it is not the stepdaughter but the husband who is the source of the conflict, and Edith has her work cut out from the word go, choosing to stay with the cold, heartless Dombey only because she can’t bear to abandon her stepdaughter Florence. When Edith can finally take no more, Dombey blames his daughter for his second wife’s betrayal.

5. Topaz in I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Bohemian artist’s model and sometime nudist, Topaz is not the most likely of stepmothers. She is certainly an occasional trial to Cassandra Mortmain, as the pair hatch a scheme to marry Cassandra’s elder sister Rose to a rich American and save the Mortmain family from having to sell their furniture to buy food. Topaz is a stepmother in the elder sister/irresponsible aunt mode, conspiring with her stepdaughters as they attempt to use love to escape the consequences of their father’s writer’s block.

6. Sydelle in In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

The most odious of modern stepmothers, Sydelle has married Rose and Maggie Feller’s weak father, Michael. (Seeing a “weak man” theme here?) In Jennifer Weiner’s immensely popular chicklit tale, Sydelle ticks all the boxes of a stepmother who tries to come between a father and his daughters, whilst pushing her own daughter to the fore. But she also manifests many of the traits of a critical mother. You can’t help but laugh at her, but she also makes you want to look over your shoulder.

7. Elsa and Anne in Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Elsa and Anne represent both sides of the stepmother coin. Elsa, Raymond’s mistress at the start of the novel, is another on the merry-go-round of young women in Cecile’s life since her mother died when she was two. Young and fun, Elsa is an ally. Anne, older, more determined, is ultimately more of a threat when she announces she and Cecile’s father are to marry, and makes the fatal mistake of trying to fill the role of mother. Determined to stop it, Cecile goes to war, but whose side is the reader really on? The mistresses who come and go are fine, but when one threatens to interrupt Cecile and Raymond’s relationship, Cecile makes sure she doesn’t stand a chance.

8. Yelena in Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

Mysterious and relatively young at 27, Yelena is on a hiding to nothing before she sets foot through the door. Often stepmothers are cast as plain (their ugly spirit infecting their looks) or very beautiful; both a sure sign of trouble. Here the beautiful, and seemingly unhappy, Yelena is pitted against the “homely” but dutiful daughter Sonya, who is close to her in age, and questions whether Yelena really married her father for love. A question that would never have been mooted had Yelena been older and plainer.

9. Emelia in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

William, the five-year-old boy cum “very small 62-year-old man” at the heart of Ayelet Waldman’s story is the real hero, but you can’t help but be moved by Emelia’s struggle to learn to love him, as she copes with the death of her own baby and the resentment of his (now pregnant) mother. Flawed, self-absorbed, grieving and guilt-ridden, Emelia may not be especially likeable – but her battle to love another woman’s child lies at the heart of most step-relationships.

10. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

The stepmother as (convenient) unseen monster. The stepmother in Persepolis doesn’t exist at all, but ably sums up the global image problem. Stopped by the Guardians of the Revolution, who complain about Marji’s “whorish” and “decadent” garb, Marji bursts into tears, claiming that if she gets into trouble her stepmother will burn her with the clothes iron and send her off to live in an orphanage. The stony-faced guardians let her go. See, even stoney-faced fundamentalists are scared of stepmothers!

Cape, £18.99

This is the story of a sexual trauma. He was, by any definition, an adult when it happened, so is trauma (Gk “wound”) the word we want? Was it even sexual? Perhaps it is more of a lament (Ltn “a bit lame”) for a lost potency. A time when he was adored by everybody except the one who mattered. Because Keith – every Mart needs a Keith – is now the wrong side of 50. Washed up. Ignored. Waiting for death. All he can do, all he could ever do, is write the same book over and over again. Only this time he’ll do it better. And his Dad will love him.

It was summer, 1970. Keith was on holiday at Scheherazade’s Italian castle with Lily, lying by the pool – ideal when you are just 5ft 6in – trying to sneak a look at Scheherazade’s breasts over the top of Middlemarch. Or the poems of Philip Larkin. His father would have approved. Scheherazade’s breasts were so much more Bountiful (Cadbury’s Bounty Bar, Coconuts) than Lily’s. Did the upper classes have a genetic monopoly on beauty? Or would they sag, much as the careers of writers with a genetic inheritance who found success young and whose only retreat was self-parody?

For Lily, this was the she decade, when Mart assured her countless women would die on the altar of ­feminism. But Keith understood it was the me decade, when the novel dispensed with realism, when plot and character gave way to authorial phrase-making, so we need not detain ­ourselves with what Lily or Scheherazade might have felt. Or what Keith’s sister Violet, who was busy ­shagging her way through London, might have felt. Rather, let’s get back to the ­swimming-pool and rejoin la commedia.

“Keith is such a plebeian name,” said Lily, wondering if she ought to have sex, that indescribable deed, the nightly interaction, or leave Keith again. Keith was also thinking about sex. With Scheherazade. He knew it was important to also think about ­being adopted, about Violet, about English literature (it’s for you, Dad), about his contempt for ­fundamentalist (Ltn funda – arse) Islam, but no one took much notice, so he reverted to iterating the default gynophobia of male late ­adolescence with droolings and ramblings of Duds, Possibles and Visions.

Echo. Narcissus. A touch of classicism. A page from the present of Keith’s mid-life crisis. Still the need to be taken seriously.

Back with the grotesques. Laugh at the 4ft 6in Italian prince trying to woo Scheherazade. The dwarf will never fuck her. Enjoy the wait for the arrival of Gloria Beautyman – cute name, cute writing – and her posh lover, Jorquil – crazy name, crazy guy. See Scheherazade make a tryst with Keith. What? How could that ever happen? She is a Vision. He at best a Possible. No matter. It will unravel in a ­Shakespearean ­tragi-comedy of drugs and Catholicism.

But what is this? Gloria, the woman with cock, forcing Keith to shag her up the arse. This was the ­defining ­moment, the moment when Keith would never be satisfied again, the ­moment feminism ate itself, the moment everyone lost. Or something like that.

We should perhaps have left the story there, with Keith tortured by Gloria denying him second hysterical sex and Lily dumping him again on the way home, telling him she shagged his friend. But Mart had never been good at endings and still he yearned to be taken seriously.

Keith tried to bring it up to date. How he couldn’t have sex for years ­until he married Gloria. Then Lily. Then Conchita. How Gloria turned into an Islamic ­fundamentalist. How Violet died after shagging every man in Australia. How Keith became Rilke and Larkin entwined. How Mart was conscience, Super Ego, the Ich, the Itch. How the 70s left every­one compromised. As if every decade weren’t the same and ­disappointment but a part of ageing. But it was just the empty Echo of repetition, of a book rewritten; from his father still only silence.

Digested read, digested: In the ­beginning was the Keith and the Keith was Mart.

Lee Brackstone says publishing singer’s memoirs would be ‘the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream’

A Faber editor has written an open letter to Morrissey pleading with the singer to bring his “much-rumoured memoir to the House of Eliot”.

Lee Brackstone, editorial director at Faber, wrote that it would be “the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream” if Morrissey were to pick Faber as the publisher of his autobiography. The singer and former frontman of the Smiths revealed in late 2008 that he would be writing his memoirs in order to “[set] the record straight”, and in November an essay from his forthcoming autobiography was published in The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art, entitled “The Bleak Moor Lies”.

Posting the open letter on Faber’s company blog, Brackstone wrote that “forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere”.

“We love the perverse and the contrary at Faber,” he continued. “And we also like to think we are the custodians of 20th-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that’s just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company.”

Brackstone said this morning that he corresponded with Morrissey via fax around five years ago, “and he was definitely interested”. “A year ago a few publishers here offered big money [for the singer's memoirs], there’s been correspondence all over the place, and I’m pretty sure he’s well away with it,” Brackstone said. The letter, he added, was “a bit of fun, but at the same time we’d be desperately happy if it happened … It’s worth a crack.”

Some Morrissey fans responded positively to the post – “What a way to woo the talent, Lee, baby! You go, boy,” wrote one; others described it as “a load of bum-snogging grovelling”. Brackstone said he had intentionally written in “inflated, pretentious” language in an attempt to appeal to Morrissey’s “more playful nature”, but admitted that “there’s a risk that it may just irritate him - that is if he even sees it”.

Martin Amis joins John Mullan to talk about his novel from 1991, Time’s Arrow

Punk poet Patti Smith first met Robert Mapplethorpe when she moved to New York in the late 60s, and the pair became inseparable. Now she has written a memoir of their time together, from hanging out with Ginsberg and Warhol to her rise as a hit singer and his career as a photographer. She talks to Gaby Wood, and we publish an extract from her book, Just Kids

At the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, a place that has long provided a home for her association with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith – poet, punk rocker, painter and urban hero of long standing – has erected a museum of memory. A poster from 1978 advertises a joint show here of their work: Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Smith, and Smith’s drawings of Mapplethorpe. She gazes out, a dark-haired wizard caught mid-motion, blurred, against a wall of gauzy white fabric. He is a lightly sketched satyr with forking beard, a Greek demigod by way of Henri Michaux. “Bob Miller Gallery presents Patti Smith,” Smith’s scrawl reads around the edges of her own drawing, “requesting the presence of Robert Mapplethorpe.”

Mapplethorpe died of complications related to Aids in 1989, and Smith has, in a sense, been requesting his presence ever since. Elsewhere in the gallery, her old Corona typewriter spews a sheet of paper headed “Reflecting Robert”; a letter she wrote to him in March 2008 lies under glass, near a marble crucifix and his monogrammed velvet slippers, size 8½ M. She has reprinted as platinum prints beautiful photographs she took of his hands when they were both 21 (Smith is now 63); when he was satisfied with his work, she explained when she first exhibited these, Mapplethorpe would stand back from it and put his hands in his pockets with his thumbs sticking out. These are portraits of a moment in an artist’s mind, details of a person known with great love and specificity.

“I’m not a Catholic, but I have a relic sensibility,” Smith says of this display when I speak to her on the phone. (The retrieved objects are just a few elements of what she refers to as “my monastic mess”.) Though she lives in New York, she is in San Francisco just now, for a reading from her latest book, Just Kids, a memoir about her first years in New York with Mapplethorpe.

They met in 1967; she arrived in New York from New Jersey, a 20-year-old who had just given up a child for adoption, and found him sleeping in an apartment where she thought friends of hers lived. (Her friends had left.) The pair were fated to meet again, repeatedly, and eventually they became inseparable. Smith writes about Mapplethorpe almost as if she were inside his head, evoking the plays of light that captivated his eyes, the work he did as he went along. “I did feel I could enter him and he me,” she agrees, “and I still feel that.” They recognised something in each other; they had, as she writes, “never been strangers”.

In the late 60s and early 70s, Smith and Mapplethorpe worked feverishly into the night side by side, held toss-ups between grilled cheese sandwiches and art supplies. She nursed him through purgatory, when he had trench mouth and gonorrhoea and they were living in a cheap hotel where the corridors were filled with junkies. They were lovers at first, and when Mapplethorpe finally “answered nature’s call”, as Smith describes his homosexuality, they still “had something very precious to save”.

They hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard. This was in the days when Mapplethorpe didn’t have the patience to take pictures, before he became “smitten” with photography; when Smith had no idea she would one day front a rock’n'roll band. They were, as she neatly puts it, “in a fresh state of transformation”, about to become the artists they would go on to be. “Patti, you got famous before me,” he said a decade later, when they walked down the street and heard her hit record “Because the Night” blaring from storefronts.

“He was teasing me,” Smith tells me now, “because I always told him I didn’t care if I was famous, I just wanted him to be famous. But Robert wanted people to see me as he saw me – it didn’t matter so much to me whether the world saw me or not, but it was very important for Robert that the world acknowledge me. He believed in me.”

It has taken Smith 10 years to write the book. Initially, after Mapplethorpe died, she wrote instead of weeping, and came up with a series of linked prose poems in his honour, entitled The Coral Sea. But his death was succeeded by the death of Smith’s pianist, Richard Sohl, at the age of 37, the death of her husband, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, and the death of her brother, Todd, all in the space of a few years, and though she’d promised Mapplethorpe on his death bed that she would one day write their story, she couldn’t return to the first loss in the midst of the others. “Robert was the first great death in a series of great deaths,” she says, “and it almost taught me how to grieve. Although you grieve differently for each person, the important part of grieving is to live.”

There was a long while, after she got married, moved to Detroit and had two children, when Smith was out of the public eye. After her husband died in 1994, she moved back to New York. She wasn’t fantastically well off financially, but her fans and friends pulled together: her lawyer got her kids a place in a hot-shot progressive private school; Michael Stipe found them a house; Ann Demeulemeester gave her clothes, Bob Dylan asked her to perform with him. She began to rebuild her life; she made a comeback.

Smith is working more strongly now than ever. She’s working on another non-fiction book – “It’s funny,” she says, “I never thought of doing another book like the book I did for Robert, but I seem to have found a voice in this book that wants to keep talking” – and on a detective story. She continues to take photographs, and she is two thirds of the way through work on a new album. She’s composing with her daughter, Jesse Paris, and collaborating with her son Jackson, a guitarist who is married to Meg White of the White Stripes. She has expanded her band to include, for instance, a group of gypsies she met in the hills in Italy, and continues to play with her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye. The album will be, as she puts it, “a feast of family and friends”, and Smith is “ecstatic” to be doing so much work at the age of 63.

New York City, of course, is expensive now and not the same; Smith can’t help mourning the death of bohemia. But she wants to make one thing clear: she always has faith in the new guard. “I think that each generation has to do things their way,” she explains. “I don’t think my lot was any better or any cooler than the present time. My daughter now is 22, about the same age I was when I went to the Chelsea hotel with Robert, and I wish for her all the magic and all the possibilities I had. They’re the future,” she adds of Jesse’s generation. “I’m certainly not the future. I was the future when I was younger. Now I’m happy to be the present.”

Martin Amis goes back to first principles, with impressive results, says Tim Adams

For at least the past decade Martin Amis has seemed intent on making the most distinctive comic voice in contemporary British fiction – his own – do the most unlikely things. He’s put it in the mouths of historical tyrants and 9/11 plotters, he tried it out for size – for laughs – as an impotent monarch and – in earnest – as a survivor of Soviet purges. He’s had a go at Americans called Russia and women called He and one of the problems with all these characters is that they have sounded too smart, too Mart. The first thing to say about Amis’s 12th novel, The Pregnant Widow, then, is that it is a great relief to find him back as a Keith.

The moniker might be a nod to Keith Talent, the antihero of Amis’s last wholly successful novel, London Fields, but Keith is a homecoming for Amis in more than this sense. Keith Nearing is the most proximate a fictional alter ego he’s written since Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers. This Keith is nearing 21 (his birthday, when our tale begins, is days away), he’s nearing normal male height, like the author, “in that much ­disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”, and he’s inching toward a statuesque 20-year-old blonde named Sheherazade, with whom he is sharing a fabled summer in an Italian castle, along with several friends (including his ­semi-platonic and semi-liberated girlfriend, Lily).

Amis starts with a typically arch ­disclaimer, the suggestion that his tale – like the murder story in London Fields – is another “gift from real life”. ­”Everything that follows is true,” he drawls, blowing smoke at the reader. “The castle is true. The girls are all true, and the boys are all true. Not even the names have been changed. Why bother? To protect the innocent? There were no innocent…” He has said elsewhere that the novel is “blindingly autobiographical” and, though names obviously have been changed, you half believe him.

We’re mostly in 1970, at the moment when Amis himself started to find his voice. Few writers have ever been more conscious of ageing – like all prodigies he seemed totally undone by the creeping knowledge that even his dazzle would die – and having looked back on his lost youth first as crisis (in The Information), then as hard-won wisdom (in the memoir Experience), Amis finally, at 60, gives it a go as what it no doubt mostly was: romantic farce. The Pregnant Widow reminds you of those medieval epics in which the hero, Troilus, or ­whoever, observes from a heavenly vantage, free from earthly care, his teenage self ­tortured and dying for love, and permits himself more than a wry smile.

The version of his youth that Amis gives us here is a fleshed-out reincarnation of the narcissist he described briefly in Experience, “short-arseing along the King’s Road” in green velvet flares, sending letters to Kingsley that concluded “Kafka is a fucking fool” or “Middlemarch is fucking good”. “Aren’t they nice, the young?” Keith’s older self observes, here: “They have stayed up for two years drinking instant coffee together, and now they are opinionated – they have opinions….”

In the castle Keith is cramming Eng Lit compulsively. He’s ­force-feeding Richardson and Fielding, fast-forwarding Austen and George Eliot, each novel seeming to him a dramatisation of the interminable sexual frustrations he is experiencing around the castle’s pool. Keith is a trier, and a dreamer (he’s also, of course, a list-maker, an aphorism-coiner, and an italiciser); like Amis, he has swallowed Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary whole and punctuates even his chat-up lines with lessons in linguistics. He is viewed by the author with amused and sometimes poignant affection (”Nostalgia, from Gk nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’ ‘the return-home-pain of twenty years old’.”) The portentous note that has sometimes been Amis’s fatal flaw is mostly played here for comedy.

Consciously inhabiting the past, particularly this skewed slice of his own past, seems to liberate his writing from unwitting self-parody. He (and the reader) are spared the awkwardness of the last “big” novel, Yellow Dog, which seemed to be formed of a ­desperation to continue to accommodate what John Self once called (when Amis was really on the money) “the real stuff, the only stuff… the present, the panting present”. Looking back he knows every contour of the territory, the sex, the politics, the pretensions, and most of all the language. By ­framing his recollections in the present – it’s not Keith that is speaking, we eventually learn, it’s his grown-up conscience, the Jiminy Cricket of 2009 looking back on the Pinocchio of 1970 – he finds he can have it all ways.

The result is a flashy Decameron of the sexual revolution; 20-year-old Keith may want to believe that his present moment – the Pill, female emancipation in the bedroom – has been plotted just for him, but a part of him can’t help fearing he is on the wrong side of the barricades (”the Me Decade was the Me Decade, right enough – a new intensity of self-absorption. But the Me decade was also and unquestionably the She Decade…”). Women – in particular the women Keith observes in torturous peripheral vision plunging in and out of the castle’s pool, topless (and occasionally bottomless) – are undoubtedly more available in theory, but not, strictly, in his experience, in practice. Keith is doomed and hamstrung in his pursuit of Sheherazade not only by his legion of neuroses, and a vestige of old-fashioned loyalty to Lily, but also by rival suitors – an absent (and very tall) Pentecostalist, and an ever-present (and very short) Italian count. Love, in 1970, appears to have been replaced by “hysterical sex” and of course “hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry”.

Tragically and despite all of his historical advantages, it appears Keith’s own strike rate as a result won’t improve on Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace in Clarissa (”one fuck in 2,000 pages,” he notes glumly), and predictably this is the source of much bathetic torment, delivered with all Amis’s mastery of register and tone. Unusually for Amis, Keith’s deferred gratification also injects into the novel that other, often elusive, 18th-century quality, suspense (”Amis novel” and “page-turner” have not always been synonymous). There are other surprises, in comparison with recent Amis, too: fully realised female characters – Lily, in particular, Keith’s almost cynical ­girlfriend, is shown torn between having it all and having nothing at all; and walk-ons who are not just one-liners (Adriano, the diminutive count, is a ­virtuoso ­performance).

For the most part Amis stays within the limits of this comedy of manners; when he is finally tempted to stray beyond it in the latter third of the book, with the introduction of the girl Keith eventually does get, and regret, his substitute Sheherazade, Gloria Beautyman, the plotting creaks just slightly. Beautyman spins Keith seductive yarns about her age, and her religion, truths that are unveiled in an ending that strains for universal significance. This intervention can be forgiven, though, in some vintage Amis peacockery: riffs on the earthiness of Italian plumbing and the obviousness of Italian men, on Montaigne and Northanger Abbey, and fresh updates on such familiar refrains as hangovers (”The air itself was about to throw up. And he could hear the yellow birds in their tree – pissing themselves laughing…”) or the evolutionary insistence of winged insects, those “armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces”.

For a long while, it has been hard to imagine how a writer much concerned with reputation would begin to fashion for himself a convincing late period to match his stellar youth. This novel looks a lot like one answer to that. Amis has, of late, become a professor of creative writing at Manchester University and you could even begin to imagine that his position has prompted a satisfying return to first principles. Lesson number one: always write what you know.