BOOK REVIEW : Feminism Lives, Despite Timely Reports of Demise, in Short-Story Collection

Verging on the Pertinent: Short stories by Carol Emshwiller. (Coffee House Press: $9.95; 130 pages)

In an age when President Bush declares that Communism is dead and from now on all of us are going to live as one big happy family in a First World democracy (even though German political radicals still blow up important bankers and many Eastern Europeans still favor Socialism), and when Time magazine declares that feminism is dead and from now on little women everywhere will fight or submit to white guys in ill-fitting suits, we can be sure that we are living in a time when “belief systems” are particularly at odds with “reality.”

We see Czechoslovakian citizens on television shaking their house keys in democratic protests, and writers--the very young, the very old, the brown, the black, the stubborn, the contentious, the females--all those who haven’t yet heard that color is passe and feminism is dead, still tell their tales.

Authorities continually proclaim the triumph of one system, but pluralism, inconveniently, still reigns--pesky and scurrying, like New York roaches when you turn on the lights.

Carol Emshwiller, according to that national magazine, shouldn’t be alive at all. She should never have picked up a pen. She should be knitting a shawl someplace. She should be riding a subway with support bandages around her legs. According to the boys in charge, she shouldn’t have a voice; but she does, she does.

Emshwiller is not only a woman, she’s taken the position of an old one. She probably hasn’t heard that feminism is dead, because there’s a good chance she never even heard it was alive. She knows the world the national magazine has just decreed though, and she doesn’t think much of it. She’s lived in a world run by those white guys, and she writes of them with burning, cutting, dispassionate scorn. In literary terms, she’s like those German radicals who blew up the banker.

Here’s how this book begins: “He’s a dragon. He’s a wolf. He is a Caribou. She tries to please him. She tries to keep out of his way and, at the same time, tries to get him to notice her by doing little things for him when he’s gone or asleep. She needs him for warmth so they can cuddle up and he can warm her. She’s afraid to leave because that’s all the warmth she has. But she’s afraid to stay.” (See how much fun it’s going to be when feminism is dead and the little woman gets to stay home again? I can hardly wait!)

This lady in question runs away to live with a bear and can find hardly any difference between her two-legged husband without fur and the four-legged male who hibernates. (All men are beasts--weren’t women taught that in the old days? These stories follow that premise out to its logical and illogical conclusions.)

Again, in the title story, a woman reports on her experiences in the world of men. They are alien to her, totally. When they take their secretaries out for a drink and say, “My wife doesn’t understand me,” they aren’t blowing smoke. The narrator hasn’t a clue about this masculine society she finds herself in: “I should mention,” she tells us, “that I have been on several centerfolds and several of their magazines, all with short biographies mentioning my interest in photography and gourmet cooking. None of it is true.”

The captive woman has already appealed to her husband for help, but, “This, he says, isn’t any different from my usual problem and most likely the whole thing’s my own fault anyway, or just some kind of misunderstanding. Most of the things I get myself into are and, besides, he’s too busy.” Later, she tries (without any success at all) to explain about her breasts: “I never asked for ones quite as big as these are and told them so. They’ve made it clear to me that’s no excuse . . .”

“Verging on the Pertinent” is either “dated” or exactly up-to-date--a bitter, funny reply to that national magazine which declares that feminism itself is “dated.” This book is a perfect gift, either for women who have given up on men entirely, or the men who have made them that way.

But I’d like to remind the reader of a larger question: What is it in human beings that wants us all to be absolutely just exactly alike? And what is that far more interesting strain in some of us which celebrates plurality, and would like to see us all individual, no matter what our sex, color, religious or economic preference?