Book Reviews : Stocking Stuffer for a Misanthrope

Little Tours of Hell by Josephine Saxton (Pandora/Methuen: $19.95, hardback, $7.95 paperback)

If there’s a misanthrope on your gift list, “Little Tours of Hell” is the perfect stocking stuffer; more original than the traditional lump of coal and straight to the point. Saxton has made a career of saying the unsayable, a talent that has brought her a small but loyal following in England. The American edition comes to us courtesy of Pandora Press, a feminist house specializing in stylishly controversial fiction, poetry and biography.

If Saxton is representative, one does not become a Pandora author by being winsome and ingratiating. Though these stories are corrosively witty and mordantly funny, it’s the adverbs that count. One way or another, all 14 deal with the ways in which families make their members wretched, particularly when they’re supposed to be having fun.

Most of these tales happen during vacations, which offer unparalleled opportunities for misery. You trade your familiar environment for something strange and claustrophobic, losing independence and mobility and becoming subject to the whims and needs of others, especially if you’re a wife, mother or girlfriend. The men in Saxton’s stories have a better time of it. Their clothes are washed, their meals prepared, their children minded. Though men might pitch the tent and open the tinned beans, the division of labor seems grossly unequal. Let’s be honest--men enjoy roughing it more than women do. Show me a girl who relishes digging a latrine and gutting a fish and I’ll show you a liar.

In Tacky Sublets

If the people in Saxton’s book could afford to vacation at luxury hotels, there wouldn’t be any plot. When they’re not camping abroad, they’re spending their holidays in tacky sublets smelling of mildew and old fish and chips. Because the English are outspoken about such matters, they tell you frankly and in detail exactly what goes wrong with their digestions. Saxton’s description of the sanitation facilities in a Marrakesh campground is not for the squeamish.

The title story is short but gruesome, focusing precisely on what it’s like to be in Morocco with three rambunctious children, a robustly healthy husband and dysentery. Under those circumstances, you don’t enjoy the snake charmers or spend much time shopping for rugs.

Food is another of the author’s themes, or perhaps merely a variation of the same one. In “Spaghetti Halifax,” a dim-witted provincial girl concocts a ghastly meal for a pair of acquaintences. This is a cruel but hilarious story, playing heavily on subjects Americans find embarrassing, like social class, or that we take too seriously, like homosexuality.

No concessions are made for the colonial market. After a while, one tumbles to the references to obscure British rock groups and figures out from the contest that “Domestos” must be a brand of bathroom disinfectant, but what’s “Beano”? In “The Sea Urchin,” the narrator’s husband reads “The Beano,” during which she hates to interrupt him. Is it a liberal journal? A cereal box? Perhaps that doesn’t matter, because the story is about insensitivity and the gulf between male teen-agers and their mother, a universal abyss.

Fiends and Food

“The Rabbit Pie Man” is pure Grand Guignol. A woman food writer on vacation meets a cannibal in a pub. He’s disguised as a food research chemist; she’s pretending to be anyone but the “famous cookery journalist” she actually is. After she wakes up in his kitchen chained to an iron ring in the wall and sees two human hands marinating in a bowl on the counter, she exercises her ingenuity and not only escapes but gets even. Better than even.

While “Little Tours of Hell” is admittedly an acquired taste, it takes only one exposure. The book is marvelous therapy for the holiday season, the ideal antidote for overindulgence in eggnog and good will.