Book Review : Happy Houseperson on a Treadmill to Oblivion

Someone Wonderful by Barbara Neal (Harper & Row: $17.95; 312 pages)

Speaking personally, sometimes I am asked, “How can you read some of the books you are asked to read? How can you stand to review them?” (And the questioners mean that as a compliment neither to the book, nor to the reviewer.) The answer is: Reading middle level novels is often a consolation and a privilege. We are not equipped at every moment to plow through “Paradise Lost” or even the latest E. L. Doctorow novel.

For instance, at this moment, I’m on a lurching airplane and everyone around me looks extremely terrified. I wish I had a steamy romance to review, but “Someone Wonderful” actually works out very nicely, with its obdurate insistence on ordinary English values--the absolute supremacy of being “just a housewife,” even if you’re not married; a woman who puts the needs of absolutely everyone else before her own well-being, who doesn’t spend time on primping or being pretty, who indeed spends all her time helping the poor, the orphaned, the unattractive and the handicapped. In other words, in the real world, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”

If you ever attempt to succeed at anything--except maybe having a baby--forget it; you’re asking for trouble. (Just as the people who have tried, so long, so hectically and ineffectively to get this plane off the ground, are right now asking for trouble.)

Orphaned Early On

Lily Teape, this novel’s young heroine, is early orphaned, raised for a while by unloving grandparents, then rescued by an aunt, a very beautiful good-time girl who is described somewhere in this book as “a woman of the cafes.” As a tot, Lily adores Aunt Grace, but as she reaches her teens, Lily is more and more often asked disturbing rhetorical questions by her aunt which begin, “Tell me honestly, Darling. . . .” Grace is a kind of English Blanche Du Bois. Tell me honestly, do my thighs wiggle when I walk? Should I wear pink organza to the soccer game? Things like that.

Lily, in fact, walks in one time to find her Aunt Grace and a burly black man in the sexual act. (It’s an index of the authorial state of mind in this book that three separate couples are interrupted four separate times in the sexual act, while Lily, the protagonist, hardly ever gets a sexual act of her very own.) It doesn’t matter, though. Aunt Grace wastes a lot of her precious time primping when--truth be told--she’s an old bag, even though she’s a nice one.

Grace has a brother, Oliver Carey, 17 years older than Lily. He’s a wonderful photographer and has contracted a rare African disease, which is going to act up dramatically by the end of the book. Oliver marries (Oh, the fool, the stupid fool!) Melissa, a journalist and talk-show hostess who cares only for good causes and her own career. When Melissa has a baby, Sebastian, he turns out to be blind. Bummer! Even though she’s invented a charity called Children Suffering, Melissa can’t stand handicapped kids.

Flash forward 11 years. Who do you think has been fielding Aunt Grace’s questions, “Tell me honestly, Darling?” Who do you think has taken care of Sebastian these last 11 years? It’s not Margaret Thatcher--she’s been too busy running England. It’s certainly not that careerist, Melissa. No, it’s Lily, who says she’s a dressmaker or a designer, but she barely gets a chance to run up a hem because of everybody else’s thoughtless emotional demands on her. If that weren’t enough, Aunt Grace, in her pitiful vanity, has taken up with a very unpleasant junk-artist, Johnny Cochrane, 20 years her junior, and an unregenerate cad.

Dash for the Finish

Grace and Johnny get married and go to Tuscany. Oliver’s disease flares up; his arms flail wildly. Melissa, pretty much fed up with her handicapped family, heads for the metaphorical exit plainly marked BAD END. Even blind Sebastian begins to treat Lily with contempt and disrespect.

But here’s the deal. Lily wants nothing for herself. She never goes out on dates. (She was jilted once when she was 17 and given acid in her party punch seven years later, so she feels, rightly or wrongly, that social life is vanity, vanity.) Lily has fallen for Oliver, the photographer with the dreadful African disease, but she realizes that her real calling in life is to get none of the credit and none of the fun and do all the thankless work, and “keep her people” happy and together. “Someone Wonderful” takes the proverb, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and turns it upside down. The less you want--if you’re a woman--the more “they” will love you.

This may not be great literature, but there are times a reader can totally get behind that point of view. Just let this plane land safely, and I promise I’ll do all the ironing and never ask for anything more.