Mantrapped: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Walled Books.
Review: As an avid reader, it's a rare thing for me to put down a book before I've read it right through to the end. I've always soldiered on with the hopes that even a less-than-riviting read might get better as it goes. Not only did I put this book down, I very nearly heaved it at the nearest wall. (Hence, "walled books".)

I did make it nearly half-way through Mantrapped before I surrendered. The constant switches back and forth between the story of Trisha and the autobiographical bits were, I felt, not delineated clearly enough. Often I could not decipher whether I was reading about Fay or Trisha. Even something as simple as a change in type-face might have been helpful. As the author mentions having been told before,I found there WERE too many characters introduced in rapid succession and, frankly, the little 'cast' lists and introductions of a new character by putting the name in bold face did not help me much.

Having never read a novel by Fay Weldon before (nor heard of her at all, frankly), I wasn't particularly interested in reading her autobiography. I admit I only read a little bit of the description on the dust jacket before thinking "Sure, this looks like a fun little read!" and picking it up. Had I read more of the description, the promise of some insight and glimpses into the life of the author still might have intrigued me enough for a read. Unfortunately I felt the end product was poorly executed. Perhaps if I'd heard of Fay Weldon before and was familliar with her other novels and her work in TV I might have been more interested in reading about them, but instead the frequent name dropping and listed writing credits were more of an annoyance.

In summary, although I'm sure I've made it fairly clear, I did not like this book. At all. But, fans of Fay Weldon may well enjoy it, I suppose.

Rating:
Summary: Fay Weldon's latest novel is worth the journey
Review: Fans of Fay Weldon will find MANTRAPPED gratifying. Others may find it trying. Half novel, half extension of her autobiography Auto da Fay, this book's typically atypical main plot concerns a soul switch in London between a down-on-her-luck, past-her-prime woman named Trisha and a vigorous, modern young man named Peter. Weldon alternates the tale of this unprecedented metaphysical event with digressions about her own past. "Novels alone are not enough. Self-revelation is required. Readers these days demand to know the credentials of their writers, and so they should."

Whether one considers skipping between novel and autobiography annoying will probably depend on how one likes Weldon's philosophical asides. Weldon has been writing --- ad copy, plays and novels --- for fifty years, and her observations about the changes in her profession are trenchant indeed. "It is not better and it is not worse: it is just different," she claims. But underneath her air of cynical resignation, one senses a nostalgia for the past, when men were Men (unapologetically inexplicable) and the vagaries of the human spirit were not so clinically explored. "Since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in public, what is there left to be exposed?"

To return to the story of Peter and Trisha and the soul-switch, the mechanics of it are never quite explained. Peter lives with Doralee, an efficient, smart young magazine writer who secretly drinks tap water to decrease the likelihood of getting pregnant. It all starts when Doralee upends a vase on her bed, necessitating the cleaning of her mattress cover. "There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base." Doralee sends the cover off to Mrs. Kovac's cleaners, along with a little black dress. But the buttons melt in the cleaning process. Mrs. Kovac sends it upstairs to Trisha, who has squandered a lottery fortune, and mends in exchange for a rent break. Doralee demands good service, and when her little black dress is late due to the melted mattress cover buttons, she sends the tractable Peter to pick it up. At the cleaning shop, Peter goes upstairs to fetch the mattress cover while Trisha is coming down, fuming at Mrs. Kovac's various presumptions. They pass on the stairs, and voila --- Trisha inhabits Peter's body, and Peter discovers himself stuck in Trisha's.

Weldon is a master of cosmic and comical sexual shenanigans. Despite the inherent difficulty in specifying which character is doing, thinking or saying what, she makes the most of the situation. (She finally resorts to using "the Peter body" and "the Trisha body.") After getting thoroughly drunk and trashing the cleaning shop, the two misfits return to Doralee, who naturally enough wants the real Peter back, but who nevertheless is not above making notes for a book about the subject that could make her career. She drags the childish pair from psychotherapist to priest, to no avail. Will the Peter body and the Trisha body have sex with each other, or with Doralee? How can they reverse a process they never asked for or understood in the first place?

I can't say I liked these characters, but liking the characters is never the point in a Fay Weldon novel. You come for the delicious, arch insights, the deadpan revelations, the quixotic observations of the things that nobody used to talk about. Now that orgasms are faked in public, the titillation of Weldon's prose may have lost some of its effect. But for this reader, it was still worth the journey.

--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol