Book Review : The War Between Men and Women

Love, Pain and the Whole Damn Thing by Doris Dorrie. Translated from German by John E. Woods) Alfred A. Knopf; $16.95; 176 pages)

There is no flesh around Doris Dorrie’s laughter; it warns, like a skull’s. The four stories in this collection by a German writer best known for her films are icy conundrums; when they are funny, as they often are, it is the reader who is impaled on the joke.

In different ways, all four are about the war between men and women, but at the latest possible stage: battlefield burial. Perhaps it was men, or their fathers, who started the war; it is women, or their daughters, who are wielding the spades.

The most explicit of the battles is in “Straight to the Heart.” Anna, a free spirit who dyes her hair blue and plays her saxophone in the park for the sheer freedom of it, is netted by Armin, an urbane dentist. He signs a contract to keep her in his tasteful and expensive country house and pay her a salary.

A Safe Exchange

It is safety in exchange for freedom, and Anna tries her best to be a love object. Soon, however, Armin announces that he has signed another contract with a successor. Anna fights back traditionally by announcing she’s pregnant; Armin, with traditional sentimentality, becomes infinitely attentive.

Anna gorges, grows huge and after nine months goes off to be delivered. In fact, she goes on a week’s starvation diet to reduce the belly that never did contain a baby. She steals one from a Turkish woman and returns to the euphorically paternal Armin. But when the radio tells of a blue-haired baby thief, euphoria turns to threats.

False pregnancy or not, Anna is a maternal tigress. She drops her hair dryer into the tub while Armin is taking a bath. “She looked at the floor, saw Armin’s ugly jerking out of the corner of her eye,” Dorrie writes.

Prosperous Lives

She and her little son by appropriation live on prosperously, though she gets rid of all the appliances. “She simply no longer trusted herself to deal with electricity.”

Flower child to love object to maternal goddess to woman warrior; the power and smugness of the male--Armin wears leather gloves to drive his elegant car--work Anna’s successive transformation. It is a relatively heavy message encased in a brittle story reminiscent of one of Roald Dahl’s ironic reversals--except for that “ugly jerking.” Dorrie’s needle does not prick, it freezes.

The relation of message to fictional conceit is more seriously out of balance in two less interesting stories. “Men” is a classic reversal. Julius, an advertising man, is derailed from his arrogant, womanizing complacency by the news that Paula, his wife, has taken a struggling artist as her lover.

Choice of Sharks

Julius leaves his job, sells his car and his clothes, gets himself up as another struggling artist, and rents a room in his rival’s apartment building. There he lectures the other man on the need to make something of himself, and with such success that the latter gets a good job, becomes a workaholic and has no time for Paula. Whereupon Julius re-emerges in his old guise, and Paula decides that, in a choice between two sharks, she prefers the real one.

It is neat but mechanical. Less neat and more ponderous is “Paradise,” another reversal story. Here, a man with a glamorous wife--she is mainly beautiful from the back, since her hair is her best feature--becomes besotted with a rough-looking shopkeeper who was his wife’s childhood friend. Bit by bit, the two women change places; the shopkeeper turns into a femme fatale and the wife goes to work at the store. In male fantasy, all women are interchangeable objects.

An Absurd Comedy

In these two stories, Dorrie’s didactic hook is too big for her fictional bait. “Money,” on the other hand, is a wonderfully absurd comedy whose message is quite successfully fused with its humor.

A dumpy middle-aged couple, hopelessly in debt and with a husband out of work, is utterly transformed when Carmen, the wife, lets herself be talked into a cosmetic makeover. Feeling attractive empowers her. With two toy pistols she holds up her bank and abducts Lothar, the manager.

A hilariously picaresque life follows. Lothar’s expertise helps them rob several of his bank’s rural branches. But it is only when they enlist Gabrielle, the bank’s computer programmer, that they are able painlessly to lift millions and transfer them into four numbered accounts in Switzerland. The ending is rather drawn-out and not really lighthearted: Society is based on robbery, so why shouldn’t everyone play?

“Money” is not subtle, and it is essentially as cold as the other three. Its comic inventiveness makes it work, though, and its wackiness and visual absurdities seem to call out to be made into a movie.