Crazed sex
Harriet Waugh
Stanley and the Women Kingsley Amis (Hutchinson £8.95)
After a decade of novels about down- trodden women striving for identity in a society that relegates them to the position of unpaid family servants, there is now ap- pearing an increasing number of novels about long-suffering husbands striving for coherence, sanity and humanity in a world ruled by female selfishness, emotionalism and opportunism. Kingsley Amis has touched on this subject before, but in his new novel, Stanley and the Women, he car- ries his theme a stage further and asks 'Are women mad?' He is not enquiring whether some of them are mad, or whether, by and large, they are, but whether, as a sex, they are mad. Was Adam given a raving lunatic as a helpmate and companion? Even though, at the end of the novel, the manic psychiatrist with a violent, alcoholic wife gives women a clean bill of health — 'if
only they were off their heads. Then we could treat-'em, lock-'em-up, bung-'em-in- a-straitjacket , cut- 'em-off-from-society. But they are not. They are not' — you are clearly meant to think they are. When not declaring women are mad, he parodies the female plaint that men only want one thing with, 'In fact women only want one thing — for men to want to fuck them. If they do, it means they can fuck them up. Am I drunk? What I was trying to say is, if you want to fuck a woman she can fuck you up. And if you don't want to, she fucks you up anyway for not wanting to.'
However, his hero, Stanley, a middle- aged executive, is a less sympathetic character than Mr Amis possibly intended. His assessment of his second wife, Susan,
Spectator 2 June 1984 which at the beginning of the novel iS favourable — she is cool, affectionate, clever, attractive and literary — has a lack of emotional involvement about it that is off-putting. Stanley's analytical disengage; ment, even at moments when he is Please'' to be comforted by her, makes him see rn a cold fish and a bit of a shit. It does have tO be admitted, though, that Mr Amis's por- trayal of Stanley's wives as female monsters is funny and convincing. Most readers will recognise aspects of them in women the) know, and the women's behaviour does successfully transform Stanley into a of unreason. victiin Where Mr Amis is unfair to the enenlY,is in the fact that they are treated as the enemy. It is as though we accepted as trot" the wartime slogan that the only good Oier. man is a dead one. Of course, it does hen,113; when conducting a war, to portray the le' amiable aspects of the enemy as their collee,; tive reality and Mr Amis, in this novel, Id declaring war on women. This having bee' said, he wages war with elegance and 11101' dant humour. The novel is about what hapPeits Stanley's second marriage when the 01:at his first goes mad. From the moment ., Steve, the son, appears unexpectedlY :er Stanley and Susan's doorstep, the knows just as well as Stanley does (wil° not, however, acknowledge it) that Steve ' not himself. Steve is an ungrown'aPa 20-year-old who has never shown anY of disturbance until now. Naturawc; Stanley and Susan will not admit ,t„ themselves that the boy is off his head. .",;es stead, Stanley attempts to treat Steve eaa though he was behaving normally, ev.0 when he tears one of Susan's books shreds and drinks water in a peculiar waY:, like ebeingn goitn a ol t o the afnonoetl te
of thehe str raiwsitiht w
k etreer drumming and shuddering of the wak system in the walls and all about. In the kit ii; chen, the sound of the water itself as it h' the sink was more noticeable. There we"a pools of it, not very large or deep ones, I-% the floor and on the various work-surfacu.”, near by. As I came in, Steve was adding tss them with what was bouncing off the glaas in his hand. This he seemed keen to rInse,,e thoroughly as possible.' This part of tl'er novel is terrific, and the restrained niattri of description is subtly unnerving. However, once the doctors are brought in, the novel changes gear into high fantas,;ii There is nothing wrong with this, exce4 that it contrasts uneasily with the realistp.'he what has gone before. For instance, elderly psychiatrist, brought in by the ly doctor to look at Steve, talks to Stainv.e.b' like this: 'One of the troubles 01 psychiatrists in England is that because u 4 ci.. the system here they often don't see a III: man for months on end. In my Yotf a Worked in the admissions department °ay; large mental hospital in Sydney and s ‘.1.1 madmen from morning
till night.
ones, if you follow me.' This is fun, Initaa do not believe that a psychiatrist, ever' of eccentric one, would talk to the parents
Fre',
Patients in this manner, any more than I believed in the female abomination who lakes over Steve's case in the hospital.
In this latter case, Mr Amis's dislike queers his pitch. Despite this, he has written a true account of the intolerableness of
those Women in relation to men. I will leave it to 'nose women who are already at war with ruen to reproduce those features of man that stretch woman's noble elasticity of spint until it breaks, but some of these features in embryonic form, are to be round in the subtext of Mr Amis's novel.
Previous page
