Book Review : Belabored, Besieged and Beleaguered

Good Intentions by Joy Fielding (Doubleday: $18.95; 304 pages)

This is a cartoon with cartoon characters and a cartoon plot, but fortunately or unfortunately, that doesn’t mean these situations aren’t real. “Good Intentions” is a story of two women, a dumped wife and her female divorce lawyer, belabored, besieged and beleaguered by a set of men who, except for one “nice guy” (too good to be true, by the way, a writer , with integrity), are all louts, morons, and churlish beasts.

Let me pause to remind all of us that from time to time, all our lives fade from three-dimensional dignity into the primary colors of the funny papers. Even as I write, there’s a woman in town trying to steal jobs from good women, and you can see it, because she acts like Ann Blythe in “All About Eve.” There’s a man in a local medical school, currently beating his wife, because she knows the answers and he doesn’t. People act like cartoons all the time, and usually it’s the artists’ task to soften these edges, make motivations more subtle, lend a little dignity to all concerned, so that their characters don’t end up looking like Blondie or Dagwood and/or the Dragon Lady.

Joy Fielding doesn’t bother with any of that. She sets up her dumped wife, a good woman named Lynn, who’s been left with no warning by a husband who she thought loved her, but who, in fact, has run off with a married woman, wife of Marc (writer with integrity, see above.) Lynn is heartbroken, disoriented, struggling to raise her 7-year-old son. Lynn is a good person: You can tell because (a) she won’t go to bed with Marc, even though she wants to, and (b) she likes to take long walks on the beach. Did you ever, in fiction, meet a villain who liked to take long walks on the beach? No way!

Handsomest Man in Town

The counter-couple here to Lynn and her no-count husband, and her decent would-be lover, is Renee, Lynn’s very successful divorce lawyer, who is married to Philip, the handsomest man in town, and--the reader can see at once--a low-down, hog-bellied, two-timing bum. Renee is living in a comic-strip dream world, reiterating to herself, and anyone who will listen, what a lucky person she is to have snagged Philip. Except that Renee keeps compulsively eating candy bars. Her step-daughter, Debbie, a fiend from Hell, treats her like a lizard. And Philip keeps helpfully telling Renee that she looks awful.

That’s not the half of it, of course. When Renee has a triumph in court and wants to talk about it, Philip accuses her of showing off. When Renee shows signs of winning an argument, Philip accuses her of aggression and competitiveness. The only times Philip ever wants to make love are when they’re on their way to a party at Renee’s law firm, or when Renee has an important meeting. And, of course, when Renee’s sister comes to visit, you know pretty much what’s going to happen. . . .

Faults Are Obvious

I thought a lot about this book. Its faults are obvious. Philip is a cartoon. But I know cartoons like that, and they’re not always men. (That job-stealing lady, that medical-school brute, exist in life right now.) Maybe the job of the novelist is to catch human beings in the act , as they switch from human-being behavior over to funny paper behavior; to catch the wife before she begins gobbling those candy bars or the sociopath stepdaughter before she begins laying about her with an emotional sledgehammer. In one of the most interesting lines in the book, Renee’s stepdaughter, who finally clues her into what’s going on, says, “‘Why don’t you just tell him to go to hell. . . . Why don’t you tell me to go to hell?”’

There’s a human being behind that particular cartoon, and it would be nice to see more of that character and of all the rest. Meanwhile, “Good Intentions” is for women whose husbands only want sex before a party with their wives’ friends. This is funny-paper country, but the rough drawings here are real.