Fay Weldon Critical Essay | Critical Review by Daniel Harris

SOURCE: "The Weldon Manifesto," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 28, 1993, pp. 2, 9.

In the following review, Harris offers a negative assessment of Trouble, noting that the novel fails to live up to Weldon's usual standards.

What differentiates the ferocious satires of British author Fay Weldon from the typical bed-hopping, feminist sex comedy is their harsh determinism. For most of her female characters, holy matrimony, far from being full of connubial bliss and the attendant pleasure of the pitter-patter of little feet, is about as consensual as being clubbed by a cave man and dragged back to a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. Weldon's women are swept up in a sort of marital Darwinism, a brutal process of natural selection in which secretaries continually usurp their boss's wives, who, in turn, often retaliate with creative forms of psychological torture. The vindictive heroine of her masterpiece The Life and...
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