In The Pregnant Widow, great literature is the language of a world we have lost. Scheherazade having been rude to Gloria, Keith (having just finished Emma) maps the language of Austen on to the sensibility of the 1970s. How, Keith muses, would Mr Knightley, having seen how badly Emma treats Miss Bates during the picnic to Box Hill, chide Scheherazade?

Were she your equal in situation — but, Scheherazade, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! But Keith didn't say that. He said,
"Hates you? Not at all."
"Everyone hates me. And I deserve it."
If Keith paraphrased Mr Knightley, would Scheherazade realise, at last, that she was in love with him? No, because things were different now."

The difference of now is that the flexible, plural, capacious language bequeathed to us is embarrassed by the fewness and coarseness of our objects. We are the inheritors of linguistic, and therefore conceptual and moral, riches which we finger with barbaric stupor and cupidity.

This is not the first time that Amis has used the idea of a failure of powers of reading as a proxy for what is more generally wrong with modern culture. In Money, the chastened, beaten-up, John Self resorts to the public library once the self-defeating nullity of his high-octane media life has literally smacked him in the face, and as a direct result of his inability to read his own experience:

I'm trying. I read quite a bit. It's the only diversion I can still afford. Reading's cheap, I'll give it that. I've read all the financio-sexual thrillers on Georgina's shelves. I hang out in the Library. The Library is a good place when you're unemployed. It's warm and free. There is shelter.