ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (e.c.leeper) (03/28/86)
REGIMENT OF WOMEN by Thomas Berger
Delta, 1973 (1982), $7.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
I read this book because I have remembered it getting a good review
somewhere. It just goes to show: when you get older, your memory DOES start
going!
This book is unbelievably bad. The premise is that society has somehow
been turned around; women have all the power and men are helpless. At first
I thought this might be an alternate history novel, but, no, as it goes on,
you discover that this society has developed from ours. How, you ask? How
the heck should I know? Women dress in trousers and ties; men wear dresses
and bras. Why, you ask? How the heck should I know? Women bind their
breasts to flatten them; men get silicone injections in theirs. Why, you
ask? How the heck should I know? Although the story can't take place more
than a hundred years in the future, test tube babies are the only method of
reproduction and no one (well, hardly anyone) can remember society being any
different. How, you ask? How the heck should I know? But there's still
sex--except it consists of women with dildoes sodomizing men. Why, you ask?
How the heck should I know?!
Now, I agree that in science fiction there must be a suspension of
disbelief. But there are limits. The situation set up here is so
ludicrous, yet it is presented (so far as I can tell) in such seriousness
that I cannot believe that it is intended as satire. (Obviously some people
do, because the back blurbs rave about it.) It's as though Berger wrote a
normal "women's lib" novel on a word processor, changed all the male
references to female and vice versa, and then patched a few things here and
there. (And badly--although he talks about the "Mono Liso," with "his"
enigmatic smile, Berger slips up and leaves it as "Los Angeles" in spite of
the masculine gender of the article.) Berger also has some strange ideas
about women--he seems to think that if women wear trousers all the time, it
will wear the hair on their legs off. I wish!
Oh, the plot? Well, Georgie Cornell, a secretary with a publishing
firm, finds himself caught up in the "men's lib" underground. He starts out
as a nebbish and ends up pretty much the same way, so you can't claim that
character development is this novel's strong point. The female lead (she's
call Harriet through most of the book, but ends up nameless) starts out with
some backbone, but gives that up and collapses into the stereotypical
"clinging-vine" female. The ending of the novel (after they've discovered
"real" sex, of course--note that Berger has given himself the excuse to
write both "deviant" and "straight" sex scenes) is truly wretched.
There have been many good books written about sexual-role-reversal
societies. This is not one of them.
Evelyn C. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl
(or ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl)
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