THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

by Lionel Shriver ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1987

This engagingly melodramatic first novel seems to suggest that the female of the human species, even at her most perfect, can't resist men who are bastards. Nearing age 60, Gray Kaiser is ""tired of being a character,"" tired, that is, of living up to her reputation as a world-famous anthropologist. When she was still a graduate student, a hot tip from an African tribesman led to her ethnographic study of the II-Ororen, a ""gnomish clan,"" descended from the Masai, who eked out their lives in a remote and isolated mountain crevice. The only other white person they encountered before her arrival was Charles Corgi, a deserter from WW II and, more importantly, an all-American Kurtz, who convinced the natives of his divinity. When events proved otherwise, Corgi gallantly allowed Gray to beat a hasty retreat while he went down in godlike glory. Years later, long after Gray has made the II-Ororen famous, she and her loyal assistant, Errol, return to re-create all this on film. Enter Raphael Sarasola, a 25-year-old grad student from B.U. who resembles Corgi in all respects--handsome beyond belief, graceful and self-reliant--everything the eunuch-like Errol envies. Raphael's strange story--his life as an abandoned child in North Adams, Mass.--takes up much of the narrative and serves to demonstrate both his charm and his cruelty. He eventually deflowers the smitten old virgin, who once again has fallen for a man not her style--or age, for that matter. And again, the ill-fated romance ends in tragedy. Too many fearless symmetries--different characters reenacting the same scenes--make for a somewhat schematic plot. But Shriver's apparent moral (""people put themselves in the situations they put themselves"") smartly rejects a psychological explanation for her penetrating psychological portrait.

Pub Date: April 1, 1987

ISBN: 006171139X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION