This is a woman's novel in the sense that novels by, say, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Arundhati Roy, Patricia Cornwell and E. Annie Proulx are not. In other words, it's a novel not just written by a woman but also intended solely for women readers.
So what's a man doing reviewing it? The answer, on one level, is simple: he was asked to. But there's another level, too, one suggested by E. Annie Proulx when she wrote that "we are not just men or women, we are all human" and that "to remove men from the equation is a distortion and reduction of the human condition". What's called "women's literature," she argued, is based on the construction of "gender boundaries," when, in fact, "there are no pure `women's subjects' in this world. Those usually named . . . are intimately and inseparably entwined with the lives of men."
You wouldn't guess that from reading Rebecca Wells's bestseller, a novel which has pressing designs on the credulous woman reader right from its opening paragraph, where we're introduced to "Sidda's gorgeous mother, Vivi, and her gang of girlfriends, the Ya-Yas". Immediately this reader wants to protest that he should be the judge of whether Vivi is gorgeous or not, but the protest is pointless because Wells is in the business of emotional bullying: she adores her characters (who all adore themselves ), and the reader is ordered to adore them, too.
It's not easy. Vivi, Caro, Necie and Teensy are four Louisiana women in their late 60s who've seen it all and done it all and come out the other side with enough free-spirited feistiness to send the rest of the Deep South scurrying for safety. They laugh, they cuss, they drink - why, they even (that last taboo) smoke! However, Vivi's 40-year-old stage director daughter, Sidda, has badmouthed her mother in the media, and Vivi's furious reaction throws Sidda into a traumatic whirl.
There's nothing to be done except try and win her mother's affection back and, in the process, find out from her and her buddies the meaning of love, life and the whole damn thing.
We have been here before, though in the movies rather than literature. This is the bastard child of Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and as we read we automatically start casting Shirley MacLaine as Vivi, Kathy Baker as Caro, Olympia Dukakis as Necie, and so on. Barbra Streisand would probably quite like to play Sidda - a bit old for the part, maybe, but, hey, Barbra's Barbra.
I disliked this book intensely, not just for its awful prose and risible dialogue ("My love was a privilege that you abused. I have withdrawn that privilege. You are out of my heart. You are banished to the outer reaches. I wish you nothing but unending guilt.") and not just for the way it demands specific responses rather than let the reader breathe ("If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Ya in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock").
No, what I most disliked was what Pauline Kael disliked in Jane Campion's The Piano - its "unexamined feminine smugness . . . This movie congratulates its heroine for any damn thing she does". So does Wells's book, but with five smug heroines instead of one, which is simply too much of a bad thing.
John Boland is a critic and poet