Warning: laughter can cause wrinkles
Katie Grant
NIP 'N' TUCK by Kathy Lette Picador, .£14.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0330487396 MIDDLE AGE by Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, £10.99, pp. 464, ISBN 1841156418 Middle Age, even when accompanied by the old-fashioned subtitle 'A Romance', is a brave name for a book. The reaction of those women who have caught me reading Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel has been horror. Chick-lit wit Kathy Lette's Nip 'n' Tuck, on the other hand, although brazenly stating on the cover that it is a story about turning 40, precipitated no such reaction. Some friends even surreptitiously picked it up themselves. Women of a certain age — and both of these are definitely women's books — are always looking for ways to cope with getting older, but nobody who has turned 40 could read Oates' book on the tube in case somebody thought it was a self-help manual.
This is a pity, since Oates provides a powerful and imaginative slice of modern American life, her trademark fascination with violence still very much in evidence but never indulged in at the expense of the natural flow of her storytelling. She also displays enviable mastery of the kind of deadpan prose that makes the members of the community she has created for Middle Age, middle income (by American standards), middle-class, middle-brow and, of course, in the middle of standard issue
mid-life crises, comic as well as tragic figures. Life in Salthill-on-Hudson, a 'village' of 'historic' houses, golf clubs, yacht clubs, tennis clubs and country clubs in which there is, by common consent, no social climbing since 'where, after all, was there to climb to, when you lived in Salthill-on Hudson', is utterly ordinary. Husbands commute to Manhattan to head up publishing houses, Wall Street banks or law firms, whilst the women live in their mausoleum houses and do the things expected of them, one of which, being middle-aged, is to hug to themselves their individual and, they hope, exclusive, romantic dreams of Adam Berendt, the enigmatic, one-eyed sculptor who lives in their midst. It is on the reactions of the Salthill-on-Hudson community to Berendt's death that Oates bases her story, fleshing out her characters with painterly detail and asking us not to judge, just to observe.
Oates' confidence in her reader is as deep as Lette's is shallow. This is not so much a criticism as a warning that the author of Nip 'n' Tuck, a book as similar to Middle Age as Middlemarch is to Bridget Jones's Diary, is less a writer than a battering ram, relentlessly bashing out humour through those failsafe modern literary weapons of overblown stereotyping and gross jokes. And why not? If you are prepared to indulge her, Kathy Lette can sweep you along through this idiotic and meaningless string of standard exploitablefor-jokes situations involving Ab Fab mother/daughter relationships, older men falling for nubile 'trouser hounds', slapstick dinner parties and cartoon plastic surgery.
Plenty of people love this kind of stuff. It is a pity, though, that Lette cannot just leave her book as jolly tripe but succumbs every now and again to the urge to turn it into a predictable whinge about our ageist society. 'Why the hell can't women come of age in the public arena with wrinkles and self-esteem intact?' her heroine cries whilst performing naked on the television. Why not indeed! But Lette fails to answer her own question. Instead, by having her heroine (and her heroine's sister) find true love through losing the surgical enhancements and just letting it all hang out, she allows a book that began as a romp somehow to end up wanting to be a morality tale. Puh-lease, as Lette herself might say.
Nevertheless, chick-lit (or clit-lit, as Lette, we are told, prefers to call it — wow! What a gas!) has proved enormously popular. It is the written equivalent of such American TV sit-corns as Friends and All McBeal, where the story is much less important than finding ways of getting a lorra laffs and the occasional mawkish tear. But if you do not fancy being manipulated like a television studio audience, I should stick to Middle Age, despite the risks involved in displaying its cover in public. Apart from anything else, as Lette herself reminds us, 'laughing too hard causes wrinkles'. You have been warned.
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