No Men, No Money, No Matter : THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY<i> by Fay Weldon (Viking: $17.95; 200 pp.)</i>

Feminist writing is--justly or unjustly--associated with a certain preachiness. Justly, because feminist writers often do preach; unjustly, because so much feminist writing does not suffer in the least from the dullness and humorlessness traditionally attributed to didactic literature.

British novelist and dramatist Fay Weldon is a case in point. From “The Fat Woman’s Joke” (1967) to her slashing anti-military satire “The Shrapnel Academy” (1987) and her picaresque modern fairy tale “The Hearts and Lives of Men” (1988), her fast-paced, inventive, upsetting and hilarious novels have instructed, provoked and delighted a widening circle of readers. Weldon’s narrative voice--sometimes addressing us directly, sometimes emerging ventriloquist-style from the lips of a fictional character--grabs us by the ear and never lets up exhorting, cajoling, lecturing, and teasing us into thought.

“The Heart of the Country” takes us into the seemingly peaceful rural setting of Britain’s West Country. Just outside Eddon Gurney, a village halfway between Wells and Glastonbury, lives Natalie Harris: “Round face, blonde-haired, pretty as a girl in an early Charlie Chaplin movie, with that same blank look of sexy idiocy on her face. It was as if she was born to go around with subtitles: Help me, save me. Poor little me. It was how she had been brought up to look; not her fault.” Natalie’s husband, Harry (whose business has something to do with computers, of course), runs off one morning with his secretary, leaving his business in ruins, his employees unemployed and his wife and children “living in a dream bungalow mortgaged up to the hilt and beyond, no money in the bank and school fees owing.” Natalie herself has been having a minor affair with a man somewhat nicer than her husband, meaning that he, “being nicer, had no intention of deserting or abandoning his wife and running off with Natalie . . . .”

Although Natalie feels vaguely guilty about her affair, her real sin, according to our narrator, is complacency, most specifically her indifference to the plight of poor people (mostly women and children) who live in the countryside around her. Driving her own children to their private school one rainy morning, Natalie splashes mud on Sonia, a divorced, unsupported mother who is walking her three children to their non-private school. By the end of the very same day, Natalie finds herself in a similar plight.

In the next chapter, the witty, opinionated voice that narrates this novel is revealed as belonging to Sonia. Natalie is forced to come to Sonia for survival lessons. While Sonia acquaints Natalie with the brutal facts of life in Thatcherite Britain and the sexist, exploitative world of which it is a part, Natalie (without actually intending any harm) is subtly exploiting Sonia, using her as a safe haven until she manages to deal herself back into the old game of living off men.

If Natalie is an old-fashioned female parasite, Sonia, the clear-eyed feminist, understands. In times of low female wages, she tells us, women must either live off men or live off the state. The attempt to understand, however, finally seems to drive Sonia mad: “Trying to establish a moral framework for our existence, to decide exactly who to blame for what . . . is enough to drive a sane woman mad, and a mad one even madder,” she says at one point.

It’s Sonia who is eventually responsible for another woman’s death. With characteristic aplomb, she looks upon it as a “sacrifice.” Sonia is not the first of Weldon’s heroines (if that is the word) who ends up killing--or trying to kill--another woman. Is this Weldon’s way of illustrating that even when their anger is raised to fever pitch, woman are more likely to end up hurting one another than inflicting any damage on men? Or is it a suggestion that the old image of woman has to be destroyed before a new one can be born?

This is a troubling question. It is hard to judge how much it troubles Weldon. As a writer, she always sounds as though she knows exactly what she is doing, why her characters act as they do, where her story is headed. The wilder the plot, the more the author and/or narrator seem to be in control, always ready to defuse or exploit the situation with a sharp comment or moralizing tag line. Weldon’s rhetorical skills, her energy, intelligence, wit and indignation make her a novelist who commands our attention. She might be a better novelist, and a deeper one, if she would talk less and listen more, at the very least to her characters and to what she herself is saying.