Has the sexual revolution, on balance, been a good thing? Rather than freeing us, sexual liberation seems to have subjected our sex lives to the laws of the consumer economy: unequally distributed resources, cycles of feast and famine, competitiveness, acquisitiveness (are other people getting more?). Is sex on the free market really what we wanted? Who’s getting rich under this system, and who’s becoming poor?

Keith, for one, the main character in Martin Amis’s clever, satirical, only partly successful new novel, “The Pregnant Widow.” Keith was born in the same year as Amis, 1949, and resembles him in other ways, too, such as his sensitivity about his height. (Like Amis he occupies “that much-disputed territory between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven”). This leads us to believe that all the power of Amis’s surely considerable experience with sex is going into this tale. He must know what he’s saying when he tells us, on page one, that Keith, a foot soldier in the sexual revolution, is about to become a casualty, that he will suffer a pleasurable “trauma” that will “ruin him for twenty-five years.”

It’s the summer of 1970. Keith is twenty years old and sleeping with a fellow student, Lily, whom he thinks he loves. At Lily’s invitation, he has come to Italy, that place of literary sexual awakening, to spend the summer at a castle belonging to the mother of her best friend. Keith, of course, promptly falls in love, or at any rate lust, with the tall, topless-sunbathing best friend, whose name is Scheherazade.

Scheherazade has fabulous breasts, which Keith goes on about at some length. In fact, all Amis’s characters talk a lot about bodies. The assembled group includes a worldly-wise homosexual, a woman with a rich boyfriend and a large backside named Gloria Beautyman, a four-foot-ten-inch lothario, an orphaned, pregnant 12-year-old, and Rita, a redhead whose sexual aggressiveness is the stuff of legend. They all comment on each other’s physical attributes and what’s attractive to whom. Even when he’s reading Jane Austen, Keith finds remarks about bodies. The heroine of “Northanger Abbey” “has big tits. Austen more or less tells you that,” Keith explains to Lily. “When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence—that’s code for big tits.”

Keith is studying English, so in between all this talk about bodies, he’s also reading his way through the English literary canon. He concludes that, from Richardson to the Brontës to Thomas Hardy, the plot always turns on forbidden love and the chastity of women. “It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall?…What’ll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there’ll be new ways of falling…”

So along with his sharp wit and brilliant social satire, Amis is armed with an entire history of English hormones. And then…nothing happens. For 300 pages, Keith sleeps with Lily and lusts after Scheherazade, and never in all that time does Amis manage to give this theoretically sexy situation an erotic charge.

Nor does he persuade us to care about Keith’s soul. We’re told that Keith is a romantic who is shocked by the new freedom, or at least startled: “Where were the hinderers, the wet blankets,…where was the police?” But in fact, the few shreds of decency Keith has, he seems happy enough to discard. To be honest, Keith is the kind of guy who, if he met me at a party, would blow me off faster than you can say five-foot-eleven. Why should I give him 470 pages’ worth of my sympathy?

Amis seems to be trying to say something serious, rather than just do his usual trick of scoring one-liners at his characters’ expense. We hear a lot of stories about sex occurring elsewhere, and conclusions about society’s future are drawn. “It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls,” Keith thinks. “The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.”

And Lily remarks thoughtfully, about a girl named Pansy who went to bed with Keith because she thought she should, “People doing it when it’s not in their nature. When they don’t want to. It’s worse, isn’t it, than people not doing it when they do.”

But “The Pregnant Widow” only really gets interesting in the last 70 pages, after Keith returns to London. Over the next twenty years, he struggles to reconcile his new-found sexual cool with the realities of love, desire, and marriage—a problem that’s infinitely more interesting than the tale of his Italian summer. There’s also a subplot about his sister Violet, a self-destructive alcoholic addicted to sex with strangers. This is another point where the novel draws from life: Violet is based closely on Amis’s younger sister Sally, who died in 2000 at the age of 46.

In some ways I suspect that Violet is the real story, and that the proper theme of “The Pregnant Widow” is not the sexual revolution at all. The novel fails because Amis himself is still too aloof, too addicted to his generation’s hard-hearted stance, to write about all the non-profit-motive factors that persist in interfering with our liberalized sexual economy—factors like families, marriage, little sisters, and love.

Trouw, September 25, 2010. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010).