November 11, 2010
Fay Weldon's latest, Chalcot Crescent (her twenty-ninth novel), is set in the just distant future of 2013, and is a very funny but cynical provocation about the ultimate costs of self-absorption, consumerism, and greed (whether it be greed for goods, sex, power, or revenge). Eighty-year old Frances has had a life of success, raking in the man she wanted (at the cost of her sister, Fay), pulling off a career that overpaid her (as a writer), and living with a certain fame and cache that allowed her to pamper both herself and her family -- until new economic realities set in, brought on by the banking and mortgage crises with which we are all familiar, and deepened through a course of farming and health disasters that Weldon prophecies are waiting for us all just down the road. In 2013 England, borders have closed, what vegetables there are are being grown in local garden cooperatives while meat is provided by mysterious government sources (and perhaps by the missing neighbors), and government is all-seeing, all-hearing, and very, very controlling.
We first meet Frances as she perches on the stairs of her darkened house on Chalcot Crescent, a house she has lived in for fifty years but according to the banging on her from door, is about to be repossessed by the bank (understand: the government). Seated beside her is her grandson Amos, always her favorite. He is a rebel, a one-time drug dealer, and an opponent of the current regime governing England. It occurs to Frances: is the banging at the door for her house or for her grandson? And so begins Frances' recounting of how she came to own the house, how she came to have this handsome, trouble-making grandson, and how her own choices -- always made to further her own needs and desires and wants -- have led to the mess she finds herself in today.
This is no moralistic tale, it is rather Weldon's observations about the potential of human beings -- and she doesn't think we are capable of much beyond our own narcissistic bubble of existence. We keep ourselves alive whatever way we can, we seek sex, career, food, friends all with the same singular and focused drive: what can it do for me? While we may couch our desires in terms of community or world needs, what we want is what is good for us -- and others be damned (although we are capable of wallowing pitifully in guilt). I disagree with this vision of humanity but I appreciate Weldon's skillful, engaging, and provoking storytelling, and I always have (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is an old favorite). I know that her heart is warm (just read Letter to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen) and her mind is brilliant (just read any of her novels).
I kept thinking of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen as I read Chalcot Crescent and marveled at how Weldon can be both unflinchingly honest about her characters and undoubtedly forgiving. I prefer her humanity-enveloping cynicism (she like us, warts and all) over Jonathan Franzen's bitterly misanthropic take on humanity. Just remember: in the future, don't eat the meat.
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July 16, 2009
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.
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