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Change of heart: Martin Amis discovers new territory in The Pregnant Widow.

The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape/Random House, $39.99

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TIME'S ARROW darts backwards and forwards in The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's complete and brilliantly burnished fourteenth novel. Most of the story's scenes take place in the 1970s, when the sexual revolution was in full swing. The fallout from that time forms the rest of the story, set in the now-historical noughties, a time that saw the children of the revolution lecture their parents on promiscuity's new etiquette (asking him to give you a call after the act is emotional blackmail).

The different ways romantic love and sex malfunctioned at those two times is just one of the social histories built into this novel of clever banter and secret, enduring trauma, but it's the one Amis writes to near perfection (some feminist readers will fizz).

In the summer of 1970, 20-year-old English literature student Keith Nearing travels from London for what turns out to be a "hot, endless and erotically decisive" holiday at a castle in Italy. He's there with his girlfriend, Lily, her best friend, Scheherazade, and a changing assembly of others. The group includes people from every social stratum, and, in classic Amis style, their freedoms, repressions and physical appearances are skewered for the reader's (and the writer's) enjoyment.

After a few days spent poolside watching mathematics major Scheherazade show off her impressive measurements while sunning topless, Keith's fancies shift from Lily ("their duolect, like everything else, was growing tired") and the game of sex chess commences. The budding literary critic and poet is forced into that madness-inducing sport – "reading" women's romantic intentions and manipulating them where possible. "Fear of the fatal misreading" worries him; he stops eating and can't sleep. Men and women's newly interchangeable "positions" initially unsettle him – until he becomes addicted, addled and forever altered. You'll get it immediately – it's all talk and torque. We've all been there one summer and none of us survived. Amis whispers your story to you as he tells his, which is what fiction is: the double story of the reader and the author.

But it goes deeper. Keith's exercise isn't confined to love and lust – he's also reading his way through some of English literature's canonical novels, including those by early feminists George Eliot and Jane Austen. Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are just three of The Pregnant Widow's many imbedded texts, and they provide scripts for Keith, Lily and the sexually dangerous "boy", Gloria Beautyman. You'll never have understood Austen this way before: guess what happens to Fanny in Amis's burlesque, risque reading of Mansfield Park . . .

In intervals between the Italian action, you meet old Keith, aged 56, married for the third time – the trauma of his 1970 summer playing no small part in that. Amis's writing is looser here; a gentler sting in the sentences; even the "now" of Keith's life seems looked back upon, a tricky trick in narrative time creation.

A number of Amis's books make cameo appearances. If you love Amis this can only be a good thing. A new work that samples and culturally updates ones you wish you'd never read because you want to experience them for the first time is a rare treat. It's a very strong writer's return to form, and it's what The Pregnant Widow issues.

Clare McIntosh is a Wellington editor and reviewer.

- © Fairfax NZ News