Backlash

A feminist writer offers some unfeminist advice.

What makes women happy? Sex and chocolate for starters, writes Fay Weldon. (David Levenson / Getty Images)

WHAT MAKES WOMEN HAPPY

By Fay Weldon

Chicago Review. 229 pp. $18.95

Twenty pages into Fay Weldon's new book, I began to wonder whether I'd been duped. Was this really meant to be a self-help volume, as the book jacket says? Or was it in fact an attempt at some fabulously postmodern metafiction: a new take on the 18th-century epistolary novel, told not in letters but in the form of pop-psych aphorisms and faux-philosophical parables? Reading further and coming across some comically bad advice, I started to think that instead it might be a sophisticated satire of our modern obsession with self-improvement. After all, Weldon has shown herself to be clever enough in the past, most notably in accepting money from a jewelry company for product placement in her 2001 novel The Bulgari Connection. Perhaps she was yet again pushing the bounds of good taste to make a greater point about contemporary culture.

But no: What Makes Women Happy turns out to be totally in earnest, an effort to pass along the wisdom of Weldon's 75 years on this Earth. The upshot: Despite our trappings of modernity, "We are all still creatures of the cave," battling for territory in a game of survival of the fittest. For Weldon, that seems to mean dinner parties where married women all but jump into the lap of the nearest alpha male. What makes these women happy? Here is Weldon's list of top female turn-ons: sex, food, friends, family, shopping and chocolate. (Yes, chocolate, the stuff of so many "Cathy" comic strips. Didn't we outgrow that in the 1980s?) Her parables -- mostly takedowns of smug, grasping upwardly mobile types -- remind us of why Weldon is so popular; they go down very nicely, like the chocolate. Actually, what they resemble more are bits and pieces of the few novels she hasn't gotten around to writing yet.

Weldon doesn't concern herself with the now considerable academic research on the subject of happiness, so perhaps it's churlish to compare her six categories with those scientists have identified. But she might have made something interesting out of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's 2004 study of female happiness, in which watching TV neared the top of the list. And one wonders why a writer as prolific and successful as Weldon -- the British author of more than 20 novels and the screenwriter of the first episode of "Upstairs, Downstairs," God bless her -- doesn't mention the great joy that can come from work. Surely, she has had at least a few of those moments when the words are flowing, the story is humming along, and all is right with the universe. But that doesn't quite fit in with her evolutionary thesis. Instead, happiness in work is an aberration, saved for the occasional woman who got too much testosterone in utero: "She'll grow up to be an astronaut or an engineer. Good for her. She won't be unhappy. She'll just earn more."

Then there's that bad advice. "Tell your best friend her new boyfriend is crap, she can do better than that, and next time he calls she'll put down the phone." Yes, do that, and then she will keep dating him and resent you for what you said about him, even after they break up. Meanwhile, here is her suggestion -- seriously! -- for women who suspect their husbands may be infertile: Spare him the "indignity of ejaculating into a jar," go out to the pub and pick up your sperm donor there. Your husband (and child, presumably) need never know the truth. Similarly, she counsels in favor of faking orgasm: It's "kind to male partners of the new man kind, who like to think they have done their duty by you." So sex is important to women, except when it's not? And lying is bad except when it's okay, when it's done to maintain the veneer of happiness?

That said, this may in fact be the unhappiest book ever written on the subject of happiness. Or perhaps there is a cultural gap: Do women in England constantly have to guard against losing their husbands to their best friends? There is certainly a characteristically British sense of resignation here, a sense that things are the way they are for a reason, so you might as well shut up and live with it. Or, as Weldon puts it: "Be good and you'll be happy. Be happy and you'll be good."

Well, okay, sure. That's not a bad approach, but it hardly seems adequate to the many complications of modern life that seem to interest her. Weldon has spent many decades thinking and writing about these issues, pushing women to abandon "niceness" in favor of pursuing their own desires but also blaming them for their part in the gender wars. One would think she would be well positioned to communicate something of her experience. Maybe, alas, she has. ·

Sara Sklaroff is a Washington-based writer and editor.