Book Review : Fresh Blood in the War of the Sexes

Girls’ Night Out by Kathy Lette (William Morrow: $15.95; 224 pages)

I have seen, and said hello to, the author of this book. I’m not sure if she said hello to me. It was on a balmy, rainy, southern-winter night in an Italian bistro in Sydney, Australia. There was a literary dinner, and everyone who “counted” was in attendance--Peter Carey, David Williamson, Alison Somers: a closed, oddly aristocratic crowd.

From off the street, a giddy gamine sailed in, crouched down so that her brightly made-up face peeked over, just at the level of the table. “See my earrings?” How could we not. They were large, hand-tinted photographs of James Dean. When someone suggested she pull up a chair and sit down, however, she got right up and scooted away.

A Nightmare-Novel

“Who was that?”, I asked. The answer, “Kathy Lette,” knocked me back. Kathy Lette, a genius in her own country, author of “Puberty Blues,” an Australian nightmare-novel about surfing; a sort of “Gidget Meets Dr. Caligari,” a tale of a young girl who beats brute Australian male chauvinism by the existential expedient of taking her board out into the water and beating them all at their own game. (Remember, our American “Gidget” was written by a fond father. The beach was Malibu, the living was easy. The prose style ranged from elegant to urbane.) In “Puberty Blues,” the chicks who basked on the beach waiting for their surfers were sex objects only--and that was on a good day!--the sand on those beautiful Sydney beaches was littered with heroin syringes. Lette, when she wrote that first book, was still in her teens.

Now comes a new collection of short stories--”Girls’ Night Out.” (Of all the contemporary Aussie-lit floating around the U.S.A. these days, this is the only volume I’ve seen where some of the language does indeed defy comprehension; where “Al Capone” is a “telephone,” where “Oldies” are parents, not out-of-date rock ‘n’ roll tunes, where an “esky” keeps your beer cold, and “sooky,” “suss,” “arvo,” and “vo” left this reader in the dark.) But none of that matters! “Girls’ Night Out” has been written in fresh blood from the war between the sexes in a madly sexist society. Women aren’t the only casualties--far from it.

What do you do if you’re a smart female, and you don’t want to just get married, roll over and have kids? Not exactly a new question, but a maddening one. (Here in America, women who have struggled for decades to have careers are throwing in the towel and picking up the diaper bag: “Having a kid must have been what I wanted after all! “) But down under, in a Sydney apartment, Deb, Soula, Kerrie, Ro, Jo and Tracey still try to figure out what it is to live meaningfully in a world where a woman’s life, without marriage and children, is, by definition, meaningless.

Sexual Encounters

Poor Tracey is so misinformed that at 26 she’s living as a groupie for a football team, trying to construct tenderness from the most brutish sexual encounters. Soula, by the end of this book, and since she’s Greek, must settle for an arranged marriage with “Spiro, a real Dapto dog from the Old Country.” Julia, in a fit of wanting to help the poor, starts a steamy affair with a released convict, then realizes that she’s treating him the way most men treat her--as an interesting object, a pastime, merely. Another girl, who subsists emotionally on affairs with visiting Englishmen, follows her “Pommie” home, finds out that he’s very married, never takes a bath and that Lady Di is a robot-bore.

In the most iron-hearted story of all, the lady surfer returns to the scene of her early triumphs to get some “recco,” recognition. She’s a champion now; she wants everyone to know it. But she and the boys surf in an ocean chocked with raw sewage, dodging excrement and using old condoms as water balloons.

It’s “dangerous” to surf now, not because of the waves but because of the possibility of disease. And as soon as she cows the chauvinist surfers into submission, the crossover heroine is persecuted by land-locked females who throw stones at her: “What are ya tryin’ to do? Steal our guys? You’re ruinin’ it for the rest of us.”

The excrement in the lovely Pacific is of course emblematic: this world, as Matthew Arnold told us in the last century, which seems “so various, so beautiful, so new, hath . . . neither joy, nor love, nor light. . . .” It’s hard to have to accept that, when you’re just a girl, living in the “lucky country,” and still a kid at heart.