The Swingles Trap

By Martha Duffy

MAIDEN

by CYNTHIA BUCHANAN 212 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

This fresh, efficient first novel speaks directly--almost without distracting fictional paraphernalia--to women who are raising their consciousness and simultaneously lowering their esteem for men. In general, it goes over subjects that are becoming all too familiar at an alarming rate: the folly of women who define themselves only in terms of men and the tyranny of a culture that penalizes them unless they do so. But the author has found an original and horrific setting for her story: a singles apartment-club in Los Angeles.

Fortune Dundy--or Fortunee when the mood strikes her--is a 30-year-old virgin when she checks into Dionysus West, a jerry-built, mob-owned "swingles" trap for the 25-to-40 set. She is the kind of hysterical small-town girl that William Inge used to write about. Her virginity has "burrowed in," and she gets more fey and deluded every year. A true believer in movie-magazine ads and a windy, unpublished correspondent to any number of letters columns, she comes to Dionysus Villa as to an old-fashioned spa, to alleviate the hope that "lay heavily within her."

No possibility of that. For a roommate she draws a grim little trollop named Biscuit Besqueth, who talks baby talk to the oaf she is trying to railroad to the altar. Down by the pool, pale Fortune's batty advances are repelled with casual, callous disdain by the glistening sun worshipers. The author has mastered all the sledgehammer nuances of brutalizing speech: the deadening obscenities, the tag lines from talk shows, the dreary threats and boasts.

Fortune escapes being brutalized only because she is too far gone to recognize the hellish landscape that surrounds her. She gives chase to several louts (one hopes that feminism will not entirely eliminate the attractive male character from women's writing) and becomes disastrously entangled in Biscuit's campaign for a wedding ring.

Though Fortune is a convincing character, one is finally not persuaded that this is her story. Her predicament is too tightly controlled by the author's feminism to achieve the unaccountability that brings fiction to life and, incidentally, makes people respond to it.

qed Martha Duffy

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