Book Review : Latter-Day ‘Women’s Book’ Descends Into Male-Bashing

Five Hundred Scorpions by Shelby Hearon (Atheneum: $17.95. 352 pp.)

Peg Sinclair is a very happy woman (the more fool she): “Part of it was that Peg loved her husband very much, and when you did that, loved someone in that way, then you were happy to see him, happy to imagine him at work; you were always thinking up things to share, looking for ways to please. If you were not in love, the same barrage of daily matters might have an emptiness about it. As it seemed to, for Paul.”

After 25 years of marriage, Paul is the very last thing from happy with his wife or children. He ignores their pudgy younger son, envies their handsome elder one. And Peg has succeeded in driving him back with what he considers to be her mindless enthusiasms. (Actually, we’ll see later that his wife is a zillion times smarter than he, reads widely, has an encyclopedic mind and carries the combined moral power of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.)

But Paul is deep in his mid-life crisis. Thinking that the grass must be greener on the other side of the border, he takes off for a mountain town outside of Cuernavaca without telling his family, not even showing up for his elder son’s important tennis match.

Paul himself is on very shaky moral ground. He leaves a mean note for his wife: “ . . . There is a moment when--never mind. No point in belaboring it. Don’t judge me too harshly.”

But what do you think lamebrain Paul does the minute he gets to the ancient mountain town of Tepoztlan? He zeros in on Helena Guttman, the anthropologist who has invited him on this venture, immediately tries to get her to hop in the sack, and keeps on trying throughout the course of the book. That’s men for you!

A word here on how the plot is set up. Why Paul, a stuffy Virginia lawyer, is asked (out of nowhere) to go on an anthropological expedition to Tepoztlan is a total mystery for a very long time, and even when the mystery is revealed, it’s preposterous. The author wants Paul in that town , that’s all there is to it, and she’ll make up anything to make it happen. We are asked to believe that two female researchers, on an independent grant--again, from nowhere--are not really studying the Mexican village they profess to be studying, but the two men they bring in “at random” to help them in their work.

A pause now, to consider what kind of novel this is, and to wonder why men have historically been so threatened by “feminists” and “feminist books.” Because what’s tougher than a so-called feminist book on men? This kind of book--a “ladies’ ” book, a “women’s” book, the kind of novel my mother used to check out of the branch library 50 years ago, and that is still alive and well in this incarnation. Feminists may rail at men over so-called injustices they may perceive in the system. But these “ladies” don’t rail. They simply wrap men in a contempt so devastating that . . . words fail me.

No man should read “Five Hundred Scorpions.” It would confirm his most paranoid thoughts about what his complacent little woman (who stays home to go to “hen” parties) really thinks of him. The only women who should read this are those who have been dumped in the last six months. The rest of us should be too mature. It’s far too late in the game for this kind of contemptuous man-bashing.