Quotable women - Fay Weldon and Mary Gaitskill

No time for a full-length review of Fay Weldon's 2005 novel She May Not Leave (Atlantic Monthly Press). Pick up a copy of the remaindered hardcover for a song while you can. At first I thought it wasn't as delightfully acerbic as her previous work, but I changed my mind about that as got closer to the novel's climax and Weldon's trademark (at least I hope she's trademarked it) denouement, in which she gives a plot twist so definitive you're completely bowled over. I think one of the things I like best about Weldon's writing - in addition, of course, to the fact that she is the most pragmatic and realistic feminist I've ever encountered via the printed page - is that she really doesn't telegraph what's to come. She's sly. There are hints. But the story has sufficient propulsion that you note significant details without pondering them too much.

Anyway, two great passages/lines from She May Not Leave:

'"It's in the nature of women to report the bad behaviour of men to other women: he did this, then he said that, I can't stand it a minute longer. They don't expect to be taken seriously."

Serena agrees that it is certainly safer to report one's wrongs to other women than to men. She tells me how recently she was sounding off about Cranmer to a male friend and months later when she saw him again he said "thank God, you two are still together - I thought you were splitting up", and she couldn't even remember what the quarrel had been about, except that she had been very angry at the time. What woman ever can remember?'

And then there's the priceless (and oh so true) line: 'Anger is a great cure for fear.'

I started out well with Mary Gaitskill, reading (and loving) her first two books, Bad Behaviour and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. And then I don't know what happened - somehow I missed Because They Wanted To and Veronica. I'll have to catch up, because I believe she's one of the most important contemporary writers around. Don't Cry, her 2009 collection of short stories, leapt out at me from the library shelves though, and I snapped it up immediately. In some ways Gaitskill could be viewed as Fay Weldon's American granddaughter (I wonder what they'd both think of that notion?). 'Mirror Ball' is one of the more fanciful stories in this collection, but it deals with a subject that has long preoccupied Weldon: the soul-stealing effects of trying to be a heterosexual woman in a world that demands you be a feminist. 'The Agonized Face' tackles some of the issues of female solidarity, ground Weldon's trod many times, especially in her amazing story "Alopecia" (from Watching Me, Watching You).

The passage that really struck me from this collection was from another story though, 'Folk Song' - perhaps because I've got to know so many scientists recently on Twitter, and have watched the skeptic movement in the UK in particular adopt a very hostile and divisive stance - to homeopathy, to alternative medicine, and to those who still have faith - guaranteed to polarize opinion, couched in terms of ridicule I think is ultimately counter-productive. The scientists and skeptics for whom I have the most respect are those who admit that scientific research has an amoral aspect at its very heart - and this passage sums up that notion so very neatly:

'Yet with science, anything is possible. With science, rats have been tortured by electroshock each time they press a lever to get a food pellet. Rabbits have been injected with cancerous cells and then divided into control groups, one of which was petted and the other not, in order to investigate the role of affection in healing. Scientists do these experiments because they want to help. They want to alleviate physical suffering; they want to eradicate depression. To achieve their goal, they will take everything apart and put it back together a different way. They want heaven and they will go to hell to get there.'