Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (73 page)

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Page 225

left town with the girl you thought just came to walk your sister's dog, but in retrospect obviously not. And you're left with nothing. And, for all you read sections of
The Erotic Silence of the American Wife
aloud to your mother, this just doesn't seem somehow to
connect
with real life. Your mother blames you, of course. Well, you are the older sister, and ought to know better.

Because there's what ought to happen, and what does happen, and they're different, and that's why you have to be careful not to fall into the black pit in between.

I'm not saying
don't,
frowsty old me, it might not turn out like that, with any luck it won't, I'm just saying be careful. I'm saying if society has declared adultery to be "bad," it may not be because God and the neighbours say it is "bad," morally wrong, but because society has observed that wives will forgive husbands who have affairssomeone has to provide the roof over the head: the children need their poppa; it's not that she wants to forgive him; but what can she
do
?but that husbands are less likely to forgive their wives' infidelitymen
do
and women are done unto, and somehow it seems more personal, more intimate, and perhaps is, when women are done unto; and husbands can be tempted to use shock-horror as an excuse to get out of a fundamentally boring and expensive domestic situation. A familiar marriage, that is. So run through a worst-case scenario before you embark upon your adventures, or at least make sure your job is safe.

The penalty for discovering your erotic self may be extreme. So watch it.

The interests of men and women in domesticity overlap, as I keep saying, but don't coincide. When men woo, they're at their best. Then it's all red roses, kind words, and soul caring for soul. This is the timeI hate to say it so crudelyfor marriage settlements, and why we need divorce laws. Because ex-husbands have a real, primitive problem when it comes to supporting women and children who aren't under their noses: if the woman isn't in the bed, cooking the food, providing comfort, solace, and emotional security, and the children aren't frolicking around his feet, he cannot really see why he should support and provide for them just because he once did. The prisons are full of genuinely puzzled alimony-defaulters who find the expectations of the law bizarre. Why pay for something which isn't there? Takes a well-trained New Man to accept the notion that an ex-wife has financial and emotional needs which relate back to the pattern of her life with him, and that there's no such thing as an ex-child.

Because we don't
want
things to be the way they are, doesn't mean they're not. (It does mean more training for more men, more of the time;

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more pouring of old wine into new bottles: perpetual prodding, reminding, refining on the part of women: less appreciation of the macho, less acquiring of other women's men. Your flirtation is her sorrow.)

So you succumbed: so you believed you were safe; you fell into a tempting bed, frolicked and played, were discovered in infidelity and your whole world collapsed. Your family is dismayed, and so are hers: you feel naked and afraid: your self esteem is shattered. Take a deep breath, take some Vitamin B, go shoppingthe season's colours, you'll find, areand, skirt lengths are disappointingly long, but you can always flash a bit of bosom. (Gossard's Wonderbra lives up to its claim, if agony of soul has rendered you wraith-like and meagre of body) Start all over again. Of course. What next? That is to say, who next? And may you live to walk hand-in-hand into a rosy sunset, guilt-free.

Page 227

On the Reading of Frivolous Fiction

Fay Weldon
January 1991

These days I divide novels into four convenient groupsthe good good novels, the bad good ones, the good bad novels, and the bad bad novels. The good good books are the ones that have stood the test of time: the mills of literature grind slowly, as they say, but extremely sure: they're the classics. It is no penance to read them.
Madame Bovary
or
Vanity Fair
or
Tom Jones
: as with a Shakespeare play, you may resist going, you may fidget while you're there, but you're glad you've been. If only because you join in the communion of your common heritage: by some kind of osmosis, absorb the resonance of the past, make the present seem the richer.

It is the bad good books that are unendurable; that, posing as literature, can put a reader off forever. A novel? Oh, I once read one of those. The ones that aspire to literature, that defy you to read on: these are the writer-centered not the reader-centered ones, which say to the reader, "Look at me the writer, what a clever writer I am, how sensitive, how perspicacious, how much better than you the reader." Or the ones, written by a good writersuch as Walter Scottwho seems to have somehow lost his knack and be writing on, and on, and on

Remember, always, as you embark on a novel, the rights of the reader. One: you are allowed to skip. There is an art in skipping. The more you read, the better you get at it. Just as when a friend talks and you switch off because you know what's to be said next: that's all skipping is. Two: you are allowed not to finish novels. You don't have to get the value, as it were. There is no duty here. I meet too many people who say, "I'll read this, but I have to finish that first." And they sigh. Why? If it's a pain, why finish it? It is the writer's failure, not yours, if you don't want to. Throw

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it away, give it away, leave it on the train, the bus: don't clutter your bookshelves with it. Books are disposable. You've probably got hold of one of the bad good ones, masquerading as a good good one. Enough to put you off for ever.

Be Not Ashamed, that is the other thing I keep wanting to say to the culturally nervous. The good bad books can be terrific.
Hollywood Wives,
Mills and Boon, the thriller, the horror, the sci-fi romp: it is true they take you out of the real world, but what's the matter with that? The real world isn't so hot. Read the bad good books while you gather strength for the good good books: the illumination of the vision, the shift of focus in the psyche that the good good book provides is strong stuff. You can't be open to it all the time. But every book you read, every book you enjoy, and in enjoying assess, makes the relationship between you and the printed page easier, more natural, until it's like breathing.

Take a parallel from the cinema: no shame in going to
ET,
to
Ghost,
to
Arachnophobia
: you know they're not Bertolucci's
1900
: you know they're frivolous: you know the level on which they operate. The important thing is the opening of the mind to invention, the exercise of the imagination. As it is with films, so it is with fiction. The frivolous can be fantastic.

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Index