Yes, that's the adjective. Though I'm not entirely sure Ms. Weldon would approve.
I just finished Weldon's THE PRESIDENT's CHILD. Which was quite good, though towards the latter half I found myself just skipping along for the plot. Once you got the tone of the book in the first half, you pretty much got the whole point. But there was a lot to admire. Number one on the list was how swift and deft her characterizations are: Weldon pulls both Isabel and her mother together in the first chapter by telling the story of the mother's favorite horse kicking Isabel in the mouth (twice), thus deforming Isabel's face for life. The fact that Isabel's otherwise beautiful face is crumpled around the chin turns up again and again, refinining and defining her relationships with others (especially men) and her sense of herself.
Why sparky? Because of the tone: I've never read anything so quick and light and deft, jumping from event to event, conversation to conversation, without wasting a word. And at first you think it's funny, because it's so light and skippy. But no, not exactly: it turns out that what you're actually reading is a tragedy about relationships between men and women, and how even though we pretend men and women are equal, and even enact equality in our own lives by sharing housekeeping and child-rearing, our best efforts are doomed. Our longings and needs; our desires for home, power, love, and sex; these things cannot be made equal, Weldon seems to be saying, and some imbalance drives toward death and dissolution when we fail to recognize that. I haven't read Weldon's new novel, SHE MAY NOT LEAVE, but I think it returns to that same theme.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
That sounds like a weird message for the author of Life and Loves of a She Devil to be sending. I wonder if she would suggest instead that certain longings and needs (like revenge) can get worked out in fantasy, and real-life couples can work out their differences in the everyday. To say that equitable relationships are doomed seems to be a rather conservative, even anti-feminist point: that social inequality is natural and inevitable and thus it is futile to contest it, rather than socially and historically produced and thus changeable (to put the disagreement in simplified terms).
Hey! It's Hannah - thanks for posting on my blog a while back. I'll keep you on my list of things to check! Glad things are going well.....
Andrew, I'm not sure. I think it depends in some ways on the narrator of The President's Child. She tells the story as a modern fable or fairy tale to a group of neighborhood women, none of whom have equitable relationships (the main character, whose equitable marraige was a tissue of lies, has long disappeared from the neighborhood). The narrator is blind, actually, and completely dependent on her husband. She lost her sight in a car accident; the doctors have always suggested she could regain it if she wanted to, that her blindness was psychological. So, her condition (I think) is partly a metaphor for our situation in marriage. Blinded by accident but also voluntarily, she depends completely on the husband. Who, before she went blind, was given to philandering. Now he's loyal. So, complete dependence isn't all bad. But ultimately, the narrator gets her sight back after she has told Isabelle's story. As if, having told the story, she is released. So, she reclaims a marriage that is more of a meeting of equals, even though it's not perfect. But she's the only one--everyone else who listens to the story is either not married or, if they are, listen to the story as if the equitable marriage is a bizarre dream.
wow, this sounds like a good novel. a more grim account of marriage than i was imagining when i posted my comment. knowing more about the context makes me realize that weldon has thought about the point i've made, incorporated it (it is rather elementary school, after all), and moved on to something perhaps more psychologically realistic. sounds like the novel gives one more than a glimpse of horror. all the while being sparky!
Post a Comment