Funny girls
Caroline Moorehead
Alexandra Freed Lisa Zeidner (Jonathan Cape £8.95) Gilbert: A Comedy of Manners Judith Martin (Hamish Hamilton £8.95) Painting Water Teresa Waugh (Hamish Hamilton £8.95)
Why have American women writers but no others — explored and perfected a certain style of wry and self- mocking fiction, in which the heroine is constantly portraying herself in a comic light in order to amuse her friends and make palatable the minor disasters of life? This extremely enjoyable practice started with Elaine Dundy and The Dud Avocado in the Fifties; later came Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife and Lois Gould's Such Good Friends. Successive generations of clever, knowing young American women have been seduced and abandoned, have got and lost jobs in government or as teachers and newspaper
reporters, and warred with loving Jewish families and equally troubled and comic girl-friends.
All that seems to have changed with time is the sex, which, after Erica Jong, became bolder and more explicit, tentative fumbl- ings replaced by affairs, graphically described.
Alexandra Freed, a second novel by an assistant professor at Rutgers University, is in just this mould. It is not always as purely humorous as its predecessors; the American self-mocker of today is a more sophisticated, more philosophical figure than her eager sisters of the mini-skirted age. But there are some of the tart re- joinders that are so much the essence of the school, and some funny comments on Freed family life.
Our heroine is a 29-year-old post- graduate, who has taken a year off everything to work out where she is heading. The novel starts promisingly, with a semi-rape in a Philadelphia park, which launches a predictably doomed love affair with a man who courts her with a Dober- mann puppy and soon leaves her for his former wife. She is not always either kind or pleasant, as her charming brother Theo and her concerned family are frequently pointing out, but she is always funny.
Alexandra does not end up 'freed' as the title would seem to suggest. A year of freedom — on welfare, bored, often lonelY — has given her very little. But she is more generous and more resigned.
In a slightly different tone, but bringing to her comedy of manners a mocking voice and a light touch, Judith Martin has pro- duced in Gilbert a modern American Candide. This is her first novel, but as a reporter covering the diplomatic social cir- cuit for the Washington Post for seven years she is well equipped to depict and poke fun at the ambitions and customs Of American political life. She dwells on them lovingly, and with sharpness, and in the tell- ing Gilbert, who starts out his career very nasty indeed, ends it a good deal nicer. Gilbert Fairchild is a vain, undersized 19-year-old who goes to college and decides that it will take him two years to learn all that he needs to know. It is 1955. Not everything proceeds as smoothly as he predicts it will; he tries and he is constantlY snubbed. But he is clever and he works at It' At Harvard, he is a student of the adroit repartee, the catchall phrase and courtship by unpleasantness; in Washington, where he goes to visit a friend, he becomes a stw dent of political ambition and an acute observer of the dinner party with Its philandering senators and over-available secretaries.
In part two, we have moved on 15 years' Gilbert has made it. He is a Special Assist" ant to the newly inaugurated president; married to the unpredictable Wanda, an he has learnt to conceal his ambitions behind superiority of manner and the right clothes. Only now he is a little tired. In fact' he might be squeezed out altogether from a Washington he has quickly learnt to despise, were it not for some core of deter- mination in his soul and the fact that,' among the many things that he has learned' not to care is not one of them. It takes him no time at all to stab a colleague in the back and survive.
Judith Martin is an able story teller, treating her characters deftly and vi1,1' originality. She shares with the se''' mocking school of her fellow American novelists a true gift for the comic one-linerExtraordinarily unalike, in both shav,: and form from these very immediate, very: American books is Teresa Waugh's Palf!; , ing Water, a dry, crisp novel about fatal life in the South of England. The tone quiet, underplayed; the style unpretentil almost to the point of baldness. But belt° the words lies a picture of uneasy bleakness,: a sort of remorseless progression not ,s' much towards catastrophe as of the pass° of time. The time-span covers 1944, when Alic,e5 Hadley is a young matron at her father e unhappy prep school where the boys starved, to 1982, when she dies. Like Dich, Taylor, the husband she marries short"
after the war, Alice is a very ordinary woman, kindly, unambitious and not over- ly introspective, who takes pleasure in her children and her cooking. Dick Taylor gardens. Three young Taylors grow up with their own, very standard dilemmas. What Conflicts there are — Nicholas, a painter, Painting water with his unsuitable girl- friend Panda, Veronica and her appalling lovers — are quickly absorbed by a family that exudes reasonableness.
There is, as such, little story. The comedy
is of a somewhat bitter kind, the put-downs by all those who believe themselves to be smarter, richer and more successful than the Taylors, but whose scorn has little im- pact on them. Teresa Waugh has an eye for the ways in which people deceive themselves, the tricks they play to convince the world and each other that all is well. Painting Water is a diary of human behaviour, conveying in its subtle sense of gloom something of a New Yorker short story.
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