Satire Gives Edge to Saga of Family Turmoil

Fay Weldon is known as a satirist, and her 22nd novel, “Rhode Island Blues,” won’t deprive her fans of their expected ration of wickedness and wit. But for those unacquainted with her work, it’s satire with as much depth as breadth, as much “back story” as front. Its jabs are mixed with loopier punches that take a long time to land but pack a wallop when they do.

“Rhode Island Blues” is the English author’s first novel to deal with life in the United States. The narrator, Sophia King, a 34-year-old film editor in London, is plugged into the Hollywood scene via her work, and her 83-year-old grandmother, Felicity, has lived in Rhode Island for years.

The death of her third husband has left Felicity comfortably off but lonely and feeble. She decides to move into a luxury nursing home, the Golden Bowl, and Sophia flies over to help her. Felicity’s daughter--Sophia’s mother--went insane and died. Felicity, as Sophia saw it as a child, bailed out on the family, leaving her doubly bereft. “Rhode Island Blues” opens, then, with sparring between Brit and Yank, young and old. On anyone’s list of satirical targets, Hollywood and nursing homes are near the top, and Weldon also alerts us that nobody’s pretensions are going to be safe either. A character as harmless as Felicity’s friend Joy, who meets Sophia’s plane, is skewered immediately: “She was wonderfully good-natured, or believed she was, just noisy.”

Still, Weldon’s viewpoint is often wise as well as sharp, and in a universe where everyone is fallible, the harshness of individual judgments is diminished. Joy, for instance, is good-natured as well as noisy. If it’s her good-natured side that causes the most trouble, that’s just part of the human farce. Also, the more we learn about Felicity and Sophia, the less we see them as dotty old woman and cynical young one. A remark by Felicity, for instance, leads Sophia to suspect that she has more relatives than she thought. She soon discovers that Felicity has cousins and tries to befriend them--another good deed punished, because they learn that Felicity owns a painting worth $3 million and try to have her declared incompetent. The nursing home wants to do the same , and Felicity’s only allies turn out to be her compulsive-gambling boyfriend and Sophia.

In pre-feminist days, Weldon makes clear, women had few options if their physical charms and the kindness of men failed them. Sophia has options but lacks faith. In the end, grandmother and granddaughter both have the moxie to bet on love before it’s too late, but Felicity does it first.