1989 Book Prize Winner: Fiction : Unholy Humor From the Heart of the Country

There is no woman writing in the United States to whose reputation Fay Weldon’s place in British letters can be compared. To begin with, for the last 15 years, every novel of hers has been a bestseller in Great Britain. She is singular among her generation here (she is the generation of Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner) in that she frequently adapts her novels for television, or novelizes one of her own teleplays, and so she has a large and loyal following among people who may never read her books. She herself often appears on television.

She has been chairperson of the Booker Prize judging group as well as a judge for the equally prestigious Whitbread. She has taken to the hustings regularly for women’s rights. She has spoken out in favor of abortion rights. She has a full-time female secretary. She was the first writer I knew of to own a fax machine. She is a playwright. She is the biographer of Rebecca West. Most recently, she has been the only writer of either sex to speak strongly and consistently against the death threat to the author of “The Satanic Verses,” firing her fearless salvos at the moribund British press and taking to the airwaves to protest the flaccid response by British intellectuals in the wake of what is now known as the Rushdie “affair” with a speech she wrote and delivered on television called “Sackcloth and Ashes.”

As if this weren’t enough, she was the first woman to contribute to the newly launched series of agitprop pamphlets being published here under the name of “Counterblasts” (in honor of the 1930s articles written by George Orwell). The subject she chose to address is the argument for feminism for Muslim women in the face of fundamentalism. She has been married to the same man for nearly 30 years. She is the mother of four strapping sons. And now she’s won a prize in California.

It comes as no surprise that Weldon’s work has travelled well across The Pond. In a season which has seen the British litcrit furiously swallow its own tail in torment over the “anaemic” state of English fiction, Weldon has retained a robust reputation. Hers are not the cozy parlor novels, nor does she dabble in nostalgia for this country’s faded manners. Her views are formed around the front page news: Her topics range from moral aspects of genetic engineering to the effects of fallout from Chernobyl and the breakdown of all forms of social caring under the sheer wear and tear of daily life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. One can count upon the news appearing as a leitmotif in Weldon’s work, but the real abiding passion at the center of her fiction is the mess that men and women seem to make as soon as they begin to think they like each other. Her subject is the war that doesn’t need to issue draft cards, dears: the one between the sexes.

In print, she is an ironist. In person, she’s a giggler. She delights in life and her enthusiasm for it sparkles through her prose. She likes to lecture readers now and then with stern asides, but the things she lectures on are things as thrillingly arcane as beans and salt, and if and when to add the salt to the beans while cooking them. She is spirited and fun to read and bloody sexy in the way she handles characters and situations, and she’s not afraid to detonate the F-word right there on Page 1. Nor is she afraid to quip and, if so moved, equivocate. Asked by an interviewer before an audience of British feminists, “Do you call yourself a feminist writer?” she quickly answered, “That depends on the company.”

Technically, hers is a poison pen--apt, but dreggy with a smartchick’s murderous intent. She has a killing wit. There is a Weldon style, and it’s dependable. There is, especially, a Weldon style of plot. This is generally composed of a) an arch, ironic narrative spiked with b) a lot of sex between c) stereotypically gruesome men and d) neurotically heroic women who are the keepers of e) weird and/or precocious children accustomed to f) scenes of domestic violence in g) a topsy-turvy random world where people suffer all sorts of h) physical grotesqueries. Oh yes, and i) the women pretty nearly always win the war between the sexes and j) the prose is broken on the page by distinctive spaces between episodes, defining brief vignettes as salty and addictive and as easy to consume as individual nibbles in a bag of chips.

“The Heart of the Country,” the novel for which she’s been awarded this year’s fiction prize, is a classic of her genre. The “country” in question is the England of the recent years, where everything is being privatized except romance. Its “heart” is nominally Somerset, but it could just as well be Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Carmel--anywhere where people live in private homes that aren’t attached, own cars and trade in gossip about neighbors. The “country,” too, is marriage; and its “heart” is pumping something black.

The women in the novel meet and bond because they need each others’ comfort. The men associate for profit and use the women as a sport. There are tips throughout (those little lectures) on how to milk The System, every system, ranging from the dole to public transportation. And there is madness, accidental murder and, too, as the result of madness, a final accidental love.

Accidents, both catastrophic and mundane, occur in Weldon’s prose as if they’re a part of grammar. Her characters aren’t more prone to accidents than any other writer’s characters, but it’s clear that she believes the world they live in is . And the world they live in isn’t something she’s invented, it’s the world she has observed, it’s ours as much as theirs and hers.

Weldon herself admits that her career as writer is the result of Accident. She started as a copywriter more than 30 years ago, then moved to writing plays for television which, she happily maintains, still gives her pleasure. She has said she found writing scripts for television “liberating” because she could move people about from place to place and give them action, things to act , without having to “explain about door handles or how people actually come in and out of rooms.”

Eventually, spurred in the ‘60s by the Women’s Movement, she felt constrained by the collaboration that work in television imposes. “One looked around the world,” she has explained, “and saw so much had been unsaid that there was going to be no end, the saying of it . . . “

“My early novels were in fact novelizations (a terrible word!) of television plays,” Weldon admits. “With this total control, alas, goes total responsibility; and writing novels is sort of lonely and television is, my goodness, enormous fun.”

Hence, the happy accident of a first novel. Hence, too, the happy accident of her distinctive style, its episodic pace, its on-the-money dialogue.

Readers in the United States don’t need to know that “The Heart of the Country” was shown here as a four-part mini-series on BBC-2 several years ago (in Los Angeles it aired in September), or that Weldon isn’t saying which came first, the novel or the teleplay. Given her delight in sexual wordplay, I don’t think she’ll mind the proposition that it’s possible they came together.

But, to quote from the last lines of “The Heart of the Country”: “Happy endings are not so easy. No.”

“She must get on with changing the world, rescuing the country,” the final two lines of the novel read. They are spoken by a woman as reminder to herself: “There is no time left for frivolity.”

Frivolous Fay Weldon isn’t, nor faint-hearted. To read this book is fun. The kind of fun that can be had when we are deadly serious about sending up the forces of oppression with sophisticated and unholy humor.

(Text Excerpt) Natalie had rung Harry at the office because all of a sudden she was worried. She was worried because when she drove the children to school that morning the school office had called her in and told her school fees for two terms were outstanding. The school secretary had actually come out to the car when she was dropping Ben and Alice off and asked her to step inside for just a minute--

“If you don’t mind, Mrs. Harris.” Mrs. Harris did mind. Wouldn’t you mind? Mrs. Harris wasn’t so different from anyone else--neurotic about money. She never balanced her checkbook and hated going into the bank for fear of what she would find out. And if the phone rang behind the counter when she was there, she jumped, imagining it was her financial misdeeds catching up with her, there and then. Mrs. Harris nevertheless smiled politely, listened to the school secretary’s tale of loss and woe, shook her head in apparent sympathy and said--

“My husband’s changing secretaries; I expect that’s it. Files have gotten muddled, or something. I’ll ask him to see to it at once. I’m so sorry you’ve been inconvenienced.”

And later Pauline from the delicatessen rode up on her old-fashioned bicycle with the week’s order, and pointed out that the Harrises’ account now topped the hundred-pound mark and could she take steps to pay?

“Good heavens, my husband must have overlooked it,” Natalie said. “I’ll make sure it’s seen to, Pauline.” By this time Natalie was really put out. Harry, she felt, ought to stand between her and these embarrassments.

But it wasn’t until Natalie realized that Harry hadn’t even left the usual five-pound note to pay Flora the cleaner that she decided to call him at his office.

Pow! Wham! Oh, the wages of sin.

Only five pounds for four hours’ work! It wasn’t much. But Harry argued that Flora was only eighteen, was an indifferent cleaner--albeit the best that could be found--and that if she was paid more the market would be spoiled for other employers.

Fiction Nominees City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) Midnight Sweets by Bette Pesetsky (Antheneum) The Heart of the Country by Fay Weldon (Viking) The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (Putnam) Mother’s Girl by Elaine Feinstein (Dutton)