BOOK REVIEW : Fay Weldon Stalks Vanishing Primal Male : LIFE FORCE<i> by Fay Weldon</i> ; Viking; $21; 220 pages
For Fay Weldon, the life force is sex. Sex is her specialty. She uses it the way a dam builder uses dynamite. It is not the explosion she is interested in, but the alterations of the landscape.
“Life Force” is the story of the amatory permutations of Leslie, a rapacious property developer and inveterate seducer. According to half a dozen women who sleep with him, it could well bear a different title. Unprintable here, it would go something like: “Leslie’s Equipment: Its Size.” Weldon is a feminist writer of utter idiosyncrasy. It is no departure for her, but only a matter of carrying things a little further, that she has written a tale that is both feminist and phallocentric.
Leslie plows a furrow of sexual havoc wherever he goes. His infidelities reduce Jocelyn, his starchy first wife, to screaming hysterics. He seduces the wives of their neighbors--Nora, Rosalie and Susan--scattering his babies among their husbands’. He seduces Marion, the baby-sitter.
Even as a ruined old man he raises tremors. Visiting Marion, now the middle-aged owner of an art gallery, he wafts her susceptible assistant into bed, even though he’s past making any real use of it.
He is Weldon’s primal male, and a monster--in part. Jocelyn’s hysteria lands her briefly in a hospital; she gets custody of their children only by letting Leslie have the house; he had arranged a cozy and unethical real estate deal for her lawyers. He persuades Marion to sell their baby to a rich South African couple; he keeps 45% of the million-pound fee; she uses the rest to start her gallery.
But Weldon’s attitude toward such a creature is sardonically complex. Leslie is useful, for one thing. At least he gives pleasure and children, as one of the women points out. Marion, the chilliest, has made as much use of him as he of her. As she calmly remarks, he belongs to an endangered species; he thinks of himself primarily as a man, while nowadays men think of themselves primarily as people. “It is an improvement, I dare say, but it does nothing to cheer me up.”
For American readers, with the Thomas hearings and the Smith and Tyson rape trials fresh in their minds, such a twist may seem untimely if not perverse. Weldon is perverse, but it is the perversity of paradox. Relations between men and women may be a circle that we will always try to square; she stands there squaring at a far arc, and with no illusions.
Her message, in fact, has nothing to do with Camille Paglia or “Iron John.” Her primal man is also his women’s sex object; the focus on his outsized equipment diminishes him into absurdity. The power of equipment, after all, depends not on where it’s attached, but on who controls it; Weldon writes a wicked reversal at the end that makes an undeniably feminist point.
It is a brutal point too, as Weldon’s usually are; and as Weldon’s usually also are, it is lightened by abstraction and laughter. People are constantly hurting and being hurt but, as in a movie cartoon, the flattened creatures instantly reconstitute themselves.
The story of Leslie’s depredations, confusions and comeuppance is told in a tone of mounting comic dementia.
Its unsteady narrator is Nora, one of the adulterous wives. She is no writer, and Weldon has her begin with an amateur’s mistakes: Endless background, repetitions, confused identities. At one point, trying to explain who lived in which house, and whose the children were, she has to remind us: “I, if you remember, am Nora.”
Her account picks up speed and becomes hilariously unmoored. Leslie’s conquests take place in outlandish settings. Rosalie’s seduction occurs under a seaside cliff at high tide, Susan’s in a cave in the Dordogne, Marion’s beside the basement water heater. As for Nora, she succumbs on a construction scaffolding high above London. Husbands--the newer, less primal kind of men--slip sideways, disappear, walk out and return. And bit by bit, the force behind Leslie’s primal force reveals itself, unexpectedly and with Weldon’s specific brand of poetic justice.
“Life Force” is nearly always clever, usually entertaining and sometimes extremely funny. It is deliberately artificial--at the end, Nora suggests that her story, or at least its wildly improbable ending, may itself be a fiction--and this, of course, puts considerable demands on the cleverness.
There are stretches where the kinks and twists become mechanical and even tedious; knots that the parcel doesn’t incite you to go on untying.
The knots problem is considerably more evident in an accompanying volume of short stories, “Moon Over Minneapolis,” published by Viking along with “Life Force.” Some are lively, and all are at least pointed, but as traps for the imagination most are pretty small; mouse-sized or less.
Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “The Ladies’ Paradise” by Emile Zola (University of California).