Word: weldon
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Streep is the one reason to catch (maybe next year on video) this choppy adaptation of Fay Weldon's exemplarily mean-spirited novel. The story could serve as a parable of feminist revenge. Mary steals accountant Bob Patchett (Ed Begley Jr.) away from his fat, drab, warty wife Ruth (Roseanne Barr). Then Ruth, with a systematic resourcefulness she has never displayed as a homemaker, destroys everything Bob loves: house, family, career, freedom. The worm turns into a winner...
LEADER OF THE BAND by Fay Weldon...
This premise of Leader of the Band suggests why Fay Weldon, 55, remains an engaging outsider among the generous circle of contemporary feminist writers. Her twelve previous novels feature a number of heroines unsettlingly prone to confirming male stereotypes about the opposite sex. These females gossip, backbite, succumb regularly to the rhythmic fluctuations of their metabolisms. Having achieved some measure of independence or success, they are likely to throw everything over for some handsome rotter or an insincere promise of love and security. Starlady Sandra knows that her new passion will demand the suppression of her lively intelligence: "If only...
...Sandra, like most of Weldon's women, manages to wrest victory out of surrender. For one thing, she tells the story of her flight from boring respectability to middle-aged hedonism with bawdy, invigorating wit; silence may be her best defense in the presence of her new lover, but she is irrepressibly outspoken when she sets pen to paper. "Look, I'm really something, me," she tells herself. "And also I am nothing," she continues, in a characteristic about-face. "I am the debris of the world, product of a series of unconsidered and unnatural matings, between the proud...
...introduction of eugenics into what was supposed to be a story of Sandra and Jack's illicit sexual shenanigans may seem jarring. That is Weldon's intention. Once again she has written a memorable novel about a woman who tries to be a flibbertigibbet and falls short -- collapses, in fact, between the demands of spirit and flesh into the gloriously common muddle in between...