Mantrapped

This was my first Fay Weldon novel. I loved it and will read more of her work as soon as possible. I was confused by the poor reviews it got but then I realized that the reviews are of the WRITTEN work; I had LISTENED to the audio CD. The autobiography portions are read by Fay Weldon herself, sharply contrasting the fictional portions read by Rula Lenska. This is a book that needs such clear distinctions. Fay, it seems, is a comedy genius with regards to gender. My only complaint is the abruptness of the fictional ending. It strikes like an artillery shell and leaves her characters (and readers) crawling out of the dust, looking around, wondering what just happened. In my opinion it "unwrites" everything that came before, making the previous philosophical discussions about gender seem trivial. Hmmm..now that I think about it, perhaps it is a good ending after all.

Fans of Fay Weldon will find MANTRAPPED gratifying. Others may find it trying. Half novel, half extension of her autobiography Auto da Fay, this book's typically atypical main plot concerns a soul switch in London between a down-on-her-luck, past-her-prime woman named Trisha and a vigorous, modern young man named Peter. Weldon alternates the tale of this unprecedented metaphysical event with digressions about her own past. "Novels alone are not enough. Self-revelation is required. Readers these days demand to know the credentials of their writers, and so they should." Whether one considers skipping between novel and autobiography annoying will probably depend on how one likes Weldon's philosophical asides. Weldon has been writing --- ad copy, plays and novels --- for fifty years, and her observations about the changes in her profession are trenchant indeed. "It is not better and it is not worse: it is just different," she claims. But underneath her air of cynical resignation, one senses a nostalgia for the past, when men were Men (unapologetically inexplicable) and the vagaries of the human spirit were not so clinically explored. "Since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in public, what is there left to be exposed?" To return to the story of Peter and Trisha and the soul-switch, the mechanics of it are never quite explained. Peter lives with Doralee, an efficient, smart young magazine writer who secretly drinks tap water to decrease the likelihood of getting pregnant. It all starts when Doralee upends a vase on her bed, necessitating the cleaning of her mattress cover. "There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base." Doralee sends the cover off to Mrs. Kovac's cleaners, along with a little black dress. But the buttons melt in the cleaning process. Mrs. Kovac sends it upstairs to Trisha, who has squandered a lottery fortune, and mends in exchange for a rent break. Doralee demands good service, and when her little black dress is late due to the melted mattress cover buttons, she sends the tractable Peter to pick it up. At the cleaning shop, Peter goes upstairs to fetch the mattress cover while Trisha is coming down, fuming at Mrs. Kovac's various presumptions. They pass on the stairs, and voila --- Trisha inhabits Peter's body, and Peter discovers himself stuck in Trisha's. Weldon is a master of cosmic and comical sexual shenanigans. Despite the inherent difficulty in specifying which character is doing, thinking or saying what, she makes the most of the situation. (She finally resorts to using "the Peter body" and "the Trisha body.") After getting thoroughly drunk and trashing the cleaning shop, the two misfits return to Doralee, who naturally enough wants the real Peter back, but who nevertheless is not above making notes for a book about the subject that could make her career. She drags the childish pair from psychotherapist to priest, to no avail. Will