Book Review : When Dreams of Love Will Have to Do

Love in Temperate Zone by L. R. Wright (Viking: $17.95; 271 pages)

This is a middle-aged woman’s dream book. It offers a world where men, though they may fool around with young honeys, pine for the sensibility and good conversation of older ex-wives; a world where divorced men may pine away with loneliness and never get any home-cooked meals; a world where the heroine gets to whack the daylights out of her touchy, sullen, sexually competitive daughter (thus ruining her own mother’s second wedding) and still get to ask said whacked daughter, “Are you ever going to want to stop hurting me?”

And the daughter--because this is a dream book and has little to do with the exigencies of what we must think of as real life--answers in terms of the middle-aged female fantasy: Instead of replying with spirit, “Wait a minute, Mom! you’re forgetting that I caught you and your best girlfriend stark naked in the middle of a lesbian love scene! You’re forgetting that your best friend is all too fond of saying to me things like, ‘You were a selfish brat when you were 17, and you’re a selfish brat now,’ and, finally , you’re forgetting that you and I have been sleeping with the same man--a notorious Casanova--and you’re planning on marrying that joker! Beyond that, you slapped me at Grandma’s wedding! So get off my back, Ma!” Instead, the heroine’s daughter, in answer to her mother’s rhetorical question, “Are you ever going to want to stop hurting me?” humbly replies, “I don’t know, Mom . . . I sure hope so.”

A Husband’s Secret

Backing up for a moment to tell the story, Michelle Paparo, handsome, middle-aged wife, is decorously vacuuming the house when she discovers a stack of love letters and a picture of a pretty young girl under her husband’s side of their marital bed. Bummer! She throws out her husband--Who’d want a womanizing creep like that around?--but neglects to tell her daughter why she’s getting the divorce. (Why she’d want to do that is never adequately explained.) From then on, Lizzie, her daughter, isn’t terribly fond of her Mom, but, well, that’s just the way it is in this kind of novel.

But fantasy rules here, and a very pleasant fantasy it is. Michelle starts her own independent bookstore, which makes enough money to support herself and a part-time employee who does all the hard work, and . . . .

Meanwhile, across town at the university, a darling middle-aged man named Casey who’s suddenly widowed, then heartbroken, takes up one-night stands with heedless undergraduates the way other men might take up badminton or chess. All that golden female flesh doesn’t satisfy him though. He needs some good conversation, and after a couple of years, enrolls in a dog-obedience class, where, by coincidence, Michelle has already signed on with her disobedient dog.

Clearly, Casey needs to be redeemed by the love of a good woman, and Michelle stands at the ready. Yes, it’s true that Casey looks at his own, recently divorced womanizing father, and finds that, though the ratio of women to men in the 70-plus age group is very high, his father is figuratively dying from bad meals and bad conversation and loneliness for good women, but that’s not a terribly good reason for a man who’s been playing in undergraduate fleshpots to marry a lady who slugs her daughter in public.

There is an exact point here where fantasy and reality clash in this book, and it does have to do with the professor’s womanizing. If Casey doesn’t stop, his dean assures him, he will be fired. Students are complaining. But if Casey has tenure, in this day and age, it would be very hard to fire him. If he doesn’t have tenure, that guy would be out of his fictional university before the novel was half finished.

The point is, characters move here the way the author wants them to. That, one supposes, is the very definition of a fantasy. Michelle is at the very center of her world, which can be diagramed: Dog/Mom/Best Friend/Job/New Boyfriend/Ex-Husband/Recalcitrant Kid. All revolve around her.

Finally, this book is drenched in sex. It’s quite nice, really. You’d think, if you knew nothing of the real world, that sex for middle-aged divorcees grew on trees, that it fell from heaven like Manna, that it bubbled up through drains.

Now, I’m not complaining! I love to think of a world where successful men pass up 20-year-olds for 40-year-olds, and 70-year-olds have lovely romances with 50-year-olds. But I have to say, if life were as sensually demanding for the divorced mother, I wouldn’t be spending a chilly Sunday afternoon writing this review. I’d be flouncing about in Maribou Mules, fending off a blubbering line of professional men, standing with their hats in their hands, pleading, “Please, oh please! Just some sex and some good conversation, and I’ll support you forever, I’ll forget those Vegas show girls and those darling undergraduates!”

Of course, fantasy is what can get you through some bad Sunday afternoons. And that’s the dubious virtue of this novel.