You'll remember Fay Weldon, particularly the last two and best of her three novels (Female Friends, Down Among the Women)...

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You'll remember Fay Weldon, particularly the last two and best of her three novels (Female Friends, Down Among the Women) dealing with men and women and children in various phases of attachment and stronger ones Of disjunction. She also has her own style--call it Method writing--in which nothing ever changes, or advances (including the story, such as it is) since ""Nothing is wasted. . . Old friends . . . old enemies. . . old emotions. . . all these have implication and all lead us to the comforting notion that. almost nothing in this world goes unnoticed; more, that almost nothing is unplanned."" Everything has an equal inflection insofar as it is particularized, trivialized. This time like the time before and the time before that it's Jarvis Katkin, a jowly architect, and his second wife Lily--beneath him either way--and his first wife Madeleine who resents Jarvis, and the single children of both marriages, and Philip Bailey a doctor, and Margot, his plump, contented wife who in private moments considers that she's only an adjunct, and their friends and assorted parapersonnel who appear and disappear. The whole book circles around one event--Madeleine's fatal auto accident and funeral which generate kind and unkind thoughts. Ms. Weldon, still very much Ms., is a clever writer with sharp eyes and still sharper nails but the trouble, a very real one, is that she's writing the same book in the form of a reprise as circular as a winding sheet.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1976

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