Word: weldon
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...says that, Fay Weldon's smile couldn't be pleasanter. A tall, tousled blonde with ample, maternal proportions, she seems the picture, if not the caricature, of a busy 41-year-old wife. Her children are aged 18, nine and two, and she is immersed in the chores and joys of middle-class domesticity...
...Weldon manner, however, is basically deceptive and only partly because Housewife Weldon is also a novelist and a well-known TV writer. The author, for example, has supreme literary confidence. Not a whit daunted by the inevitable comparison between her novel and Mary McCarthy's The Group, she believes Down Among the Women is superior. "Mary McCarthy's girl problems seem to be unrelated to the boring problems of ordinary women," she says. "What I write seems to be the common experience, rooted in children-washing-shopping-cancer-death and all the rest of the messy things women...
...Wanda cries, and "the force of the expletive shatters even her." But men, finally, are not the enemy. Mrs. Weldon can even pity them. "Man seems not so much wicked as frail," she writes, "unable to face pain, trouble and growing old." What she cannot forgive is nature. "A good woman," she concludes with supreme bitterness, "knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her." Down Among the Women is a passionate diatribe against the cruel specialities of female mortality, against a "terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death...
...girls - some of them middle-aged - who have not lived in this messy world, the book offers only irony and scorn, the scorn of the combat veteran for the rear-echelon soldier. Yet Author Weldon feels a kind of terror in the presence of the scarcely helpless woman of the future, as projected by Scarlet's daughter Byzantia. Condescending to her mother's generation, Byzantia sees men as the symptom "of a fearful disease from which you all suffered" With Byzantia, "nothing is hidden, nothing is feared. " Everything is discussed - that is, "rendered harmless" - and then "simply forgotten...
Cool, cool Byzantia, Mrs. Weldon decides, "is a destroyer" in a generation created to destroy forever a certain sort of female image. A bit melodramatic, even scifi, perhaps. Yet beside Fay Weldon, all the Germaine Greers, all the Kate Milletts, all the non-fictionists of Women's Liberation pale into abstract theory...