Picks & Pans invited feminist firebrand CAMILLE PAGLIA, professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae and a new volume of essays, Sex, Art and American Culture, to review Greer's sweeping new study.
Germaine Greer is back. Unfortunately, she's in a very bad mood. Publication of The Change offers young American women an opportunity to gel to know one of the great lost figures of feminism. When her wonderful first book, The Female Eunuch, was released in 1970, Greer cut a brilliant track across the cultural sky. She was witty, learned, sexy and stylish. In her uproarious debate with Norman Mailer at New York's Town Hall, she tartly put men in their place and created a sophisticatcd sexual persona for female intelligence that has never been surpassed.
But Greer and feminism took a wrong turn. Within three years, the thrilling vivacity and humor had turned into dreary ranting. As feminist ideology hardened into political correctness in the '70s, the dazzlingly gifted Greer tragically cheered it on instead of protesting. Her subsequent books, unevenly researched and shot through with dogma, never won Greer the academic respect that once seemed hers for the asking.
The Change, along with Gail Sheehy's recent best-seller about menopause, The Silent Passage, heralds a major shift in thinking about gender. After more than 20 years of "social constructionism" (which attributes all sexual differences to social conditioning), women are ready to think about nature again. Hormones are back in fashion.
In The Change, Greer searches the lives of prominent women of the past for references to menopause—and finds frustratingly few. She surveys the history of menopause as a medical category and deftly outlines woman's fantastically complex endocrine system. To relieve menopausal distress, Greer endorses traditional herbal remedies and aromatherapy. She is skeptical about estrogen replacement, which she feels simply postpones the inevitable aging process. She argues that spiritual renewal, not plastic surgery, is menopausal women's best hope for happiness.
In her most fascinating chapter, Greer transforms the stereotype of the cursing, half-cracked crone or witch into a symbol of elderly women's solitude, freedom and vision. This will surely prove inspirational to lonely widows or dutiful wives callously abandoned for younger women. But Greer backs away from her aggressive, malicious crone. Her last chapter—glorifying the noble, plucky female spirit bravely carrying on against all odds—is cloyingly sentimental, the kind of airy, uplifting effusion that was a staple of genteel ladies' magazines in pre-feminist days. She strains for a glowing finale to what is a very dark book.
The robins and crocuses that suddenly pop up cannot conceal the fact that The Change seethes with vindictive bitterness toward men, who appear only as smelly, grotesque caricatures. Science and medicine are too often maligned here as a greedy, brutal, monolithic "male-supremacist" establishment. There are scattered slaps at "consumer culture," but no sustained political analysis. And let's face it: For all her professed socialism, Greer lives like a duchess.
Greer's glum sense of isolation may owe less to menopause than to her own misjudgments, as well as to a failure to rethink her rigid antimale feminist ideology. When she left the University of Warwick after the heady success of The Female Eunuch, Greer and academe both lost. Outside the discipline of the academic world, Greer's scholarly skills never developed. Her thinking is always stimulating but tends to dissipate itself in flashy spurts. She recently returned to teaching as an unofficial fellow of Cambridge University, but too much time was wasted.
Whatever the defects of her work, Greer is one of the women of the century. Her sharp tongue, vibrant personality and spiritual odyssey will be just as vivid a hundred years from now as they are today. Indeed, Greer may be an even more powerful figure, freed from the burden of our expectations as her contemporaries and disappointed fans. (Knopf, $24)
Photographs by Steven Meisel
For weeks before this book was published there were breathless rumors that in it Madonna would be offering the hospitality of her body to an assortment of men, women, household pets, sharp instruments and, shades of Truth or Dare, another bottle. But when you open Sex, it turns out she isn't seriously involved with the bottle, just posing coyly behind it. Or maybe the bottle is playing hard to get.
Deflated expectations. That would be one reason why, although Sex has sold more than 300,000 copies, the shock waves it was supposed to set off never quite got moving. Though Madonna docs things in this book that we must all hope will never become a required career move for other celebrities—do you really want to see Wilfred Brimley in a leather sling?—much of its calculated lewdness is familiar, a denatured version of the fashion spreads photographer Helmut Newton pioneered in the 1970s.
It is also hard to stir up outrage when, for years, her albums and movies haven't seemed so much like products in themselves as deluxe keepsakes from the publicity campaigns that launch them. Likewise Sex, a memento of the PR juggernaut designed to pump sales of her so-so album, Erotica, and usher in Body of Evidence, her film with Willem Dafoe. By its January release we'll all be disappointed if she does anything short of plunge Dafoe into a vat of canola oil and romance him with a jackhammer.
What is the crucial byproduct that Sex was truly meant to generate? Not arousal, not even shock—just talk. Attackers were supposed to attack. Defenders were supposed to invoke the name of every artist, from Manet to Mapplethorpe, who ever toyed with the sexual anxieties of the middle class. For the most part, everybody passed. Maybe they remembered that Madonna's most pertinent historical precursor is Mae West. In 1926 she clinched her fame by mounting a racy Broadway revue. It was scandalous enough to get her thrown into a New York City jail for eight days of priceless publicity. And the show was called? Sex. (Warner Books, $49.95)
by John Updike
Bloated, meandering, tiresome—but with flashes of blinding grace—Updike's 15th novel is a curious evocation of a time of unsafe sex and even more dangerous narcissism. Asked the history journal Retrospect to look back on the Ford presidency, Wayward Junior College history prof Alf Clayton instead tumbles into his personal past. His response to Retrospect, which provides the text for this book, interweaves those '70s memories with the pages of a biography he was trying to write at the time. The libidinous Clayton, it turns out, is fascinated by James Buchanan, "the only bachelor President," possibly "our only virgin President"—a man whose only recorded romance resulted in the young woman's death, at age 23, of a "fatal hysteria" brought on by his social stupidity.
There's just about as much drama—and stupidity—going on in Clayton's New Hampshire household, or rather, households. Having ditched his wife, Norma, "the Queen of Disorder," and their three children, he lives alone, in far seedier circumstances, counting on visits from his mistress, Genevieve, otherwise known as "The Perfect Wife." The kids are depressed, sullen. Norma has gone on to affairs of her own. Clayton has convinced himself that "I was leaving this marriage as a tribute to marriage, to create a perfect marriage."
He isn't alone in his intellectual—or physical—groping. Just about all the faculty couples and half the student body are sexually changing, rearranging. "No condoms then, no fear of the microscopic," Clayton recalls. "The dangers were all macrocosmic, vague and huge."
The dangers for Buchanan were more specific, but loomed as large; "stiff and conscientious and cautious," he pushed away the inevitable Civil War. And in the end, Clayton doesn't get a handle on him: "Composing history is like packing a suitcase with objects that persist in overflowing, or underfilling the space," he decides. Looking for facts, what Retrospect gels from Clayton—and his creator, Updike—is a more transcendent truth: "What a quick idle thing a life is, in retrospect. How quickly we become history, while wanting always to be news." (Knopf, $23)
by Nick Lyons
The trout has a brain the size of a pea. This makes it a worthy intellectual adversary for most fly fishermen, including Lyons, a former English professor and the author of five previous fishing books. Despite his elegant prose style and his years spent pursuing trout, Lyons is as flummoxed and enchanted by these creatures as are the rest of his brethren.
In Spring Creek he has written a luminous memoir of a month spent in flyfishing paradise. Located on an unspecified river flowing through an unnamed Western state, this secluded stretch of private water is filled with wild, superwary, if not downright paranoid brown trout—some seemingly approaching canoe size. The angling is tough here. But Lyons is guided by fishing buddy Herb, a sort of Zen master with a fly rod. As Herb teaches him stealth and finesse, the writer illuminates his surroundings.
Although Lyons tends to muse on the likes of Kafka and Cezanne, the book is anchored in fine observation: "You always see the birds first, in rivers, on salt water, they are the great harbingers of feeding fish." (That is a flat-out truth.) And there is humor. At one point, when he falls into a muskrat hole and nearly breaks his ankle, Lyons realizes that, rather than becoming one with his surroundings, "it might be better lo become two with nature." (Atlantic Monthly, $20)
by Martin Cruz Smith
Late at night while the city of Moscow sleeps, the melancholic investigator Arkady Renko listens to the voice of his lost love, Irina Asanova, over the wavelengths of Radio Liberty. Last seen together at the end of Gorky, Park. Cruz Smith's first of these series-novels, the two lovers parted company in New York City, where Irina needed to remain in order to escape the reprisal of the KGB. Polar Star, Smith's second novel, charted Arkady's exile on a Siberian freighter; and now in Red Square, we find the detective back in Moscow trying to uncover the mob-style execution of a black marketeer that he has strong-armed into being an informer.
Cruz Smith vividly details the welter of a present-day Moscow agitated by various undercurrents of underworld activity; indeed the sheer evocation of his writing in the Moscow section can stand up against almost any other contemporary novel of literary fiction. A description of beets being sold to a queue of Soviet citizens becomes poetry in his hands. "In the reflection off the water running from the sacks of beets the entire park glowed in a spreading lens of red."
However, the novel becomes a bit less inspired when its action switches to Munich where, besides trying to reunite himself with Irina, Arkady manages to land in the middle of an art scam. Perhaps in his next installment, Cruz Smith will consider having his first-rate, beautifully realized main character spend a bit more time on his home turf. (Random House, $23)
- Contributors:
- Camille Paglia,
- Richard Lacayo,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Jack Friedman,
- Joseph Olshan.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
