I love reading Fay Weldon. Her novels are a pleasure to sink into, and so were her short stories that I read yesterday in a collection entitled Polaris.  Weldon creates within the first moments of her pieces an easy slide of words that ease down into familiar and yet slightly off-kilter situations. The stories move forward with characters who are on the surface upstanding and decent but underneath, nurse dreams of licentiousness and avarice, and of realization of desires, both material and sexual. In pursuing both the maintenance of outward appearance and the appeasement of inner desires, the characters reveal the layered truths, both brutal and funny, of human relationships.

Weldon writes about women, and she understands just what makes women crazy, both angry-crazy and love-crazy.  Like Antonya Nelson, Weldon has a gift for conveying the reality of women as mothers, as lovers, and as friends.  In a world of superficial judgments, exploitative roles, and still-persistent double standards, Weldon’s characters are just trying to work out what they want and who they are.  Whether they realize it (as in the stories “Polaris” and “The School Run”) or not (as in the stories “Delights of France or Horrors of the Road” or “Christmas Lists –A Seasonal Story”), they are engaged in battle, fighting to free women from the imprisonment of definitions. Slut, wife, mother: all these words are loaded and Weldon’s characters are gun-happy in releasing the charges.

Weldon’s stories are very funny but also very real, all working around relationships that are common-place, except for the woman at the center of the story: to her, the situation is unique and exacting, a misery and a trial.  Weldon conveys the pain but also the absurdity of the trials her characters put themselves through, and she hits on the truth of every situation she presents with a sudden acuity of conclusion. She sums up marriage:  “He could complain, with fairness, that her inability to enjoy the good things he gave her…undermined the point of his very existence, and she equally fairly, that he failed to appreciate how much that existence depended upon her martyrdom….“  She sums up frustration:  “But that’s the way things go — life is the opposite of fair.  It stuns you one moment and trips your feet from under you the next, and then jumps up and down on you, pound, pound, pound for good measure.”  She sums up men: “it is common wisdom that the way [for men] to stay sane…is to have lots of sex and lots of children.”

But Weldon never sums up women. Instead she gives us a mirror, a fun house mirror with slight imbalances, and lets us see for ourselves just how silly and wonderful and decent and indecent we can be. The images are there, and it is up to us to come to our own conclusions and do our own summing-up, but there is a price to be paid for knowledge.  Weldon’s final story, “Redundant! Or the Wife’s Revenge” ends with: “The more we know, the older we get.  The body quite withers away, in the harsh light of wisdom.”  Tragic, true, but funny: the words, and the women, of Weldon