Turnabout What?

By J.S.

REGIMENT OF WOMEN by THOMAS BERGER 349 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

The author of a novel as good as Thomas Berger's Little Big Man is not soon forgiven. That marvelous saddlebag full of lies from the Old West was too crankily individualistic for the kind of discreet repetition that is the basis of a successful literary career. Yet anything short of a second Little Big Man is likely to be waved fretfully away by Berger's most devoted admirers.

The writer of this review, a Little Big Man fanatic, has never been able to feel anything more positive than impatience for Berger's interminable Reinhardt trilogy, a thousand-page mope about the flounderings of a fat loser. The impatience is not a bit dispelled by Regiment of Women. Berger's latest book is either a grossly awkward takeoff on the excesses of Women's Lib or a blundering satire about the way men treat women. The fact that a careful observer cannot decide which is one indication of what is wrong with the kind of novel Berger has written.

His naughty supposition is that in some unspecified way, women have taken over power in the U.S., accomplishing a wholesale reversal of sex roles. Women wear trousers, smoke pipes and talk tough; men wear bras (after silicone injections), makeup and pantyhose and mince about in a way that is usually thought of as faggish. Women are executives, men are secretaries. Babies are hatched in laboratories; the standard sex act does not bear repeating. But men who cannot achieve ecstasy in this way are lectured gravely by female psychiatrists.

Drag. This turnabout sounds like something that might have been thought up and then discarded by Kilgore Trout, the seedy science-fiction writer who skulks through the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Its spinning out does not amount to much unless the reader is unusually titillated by characters in drag. The novel's plot involves a pretty secretary named Georgie who at first accepts man's lot--being pawed by his boss and whistled at by foul-mouthed female construction workers--and then gradually rebels, fleeing to the Maine woods with a winsome and similarly disaffected FBI girl named Harriet.

If Berger is not simply mocking the humorless posturing of radical Women's Libbers and the increased respectability of homosexuality, is he saying that the domination of either sex by the other is obscene? In that case circa 1973, the subject is not startling enough to serve as underpinning for a satirical novel with intent to shock. As a corollary to the sex reversal, Berger describes extreme cultural and economic dilapidation. Is this merely the author's way of flushing the U.S. a few decades down the drain of the future, or is he questioning the competence of women--once in the saddle--to run things at all?

All this fruitless ambiguity is made worse by the realistic tone of the narration, which is totally at odds with the content. George Orwell persuades us easily in Animal Farm that beasts talk, but Berger fails to establish a mood in which it is believable that larger and stronger men cower before swaggering women, and that an entire society has lost all knowledge of normal sex.

The end of the story recalls Thorne Smith at his most coy: under the stars up there in Maine, Georgie and Harriet at last discover old-fashioned sex. They like it, and Berger seems to like them. Splendid. But if that is the message, was the message really necessary?

J .S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.