Beware of Seduction
RASMINSKY, JUDITH SKLAR
Beware of Seduction THE HUSBAND By Sol Stein Coward-McCann. 288 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by JUDITH SKLAR RASMINSKY Assistant editor. Harper & Row This is a work in mixed-media?a tract disguised as...
...He has been married to his pretty wife Rose for 17 years, apparently with similar success, and has two lovely children and a genuine Buffet on his living room wall...
...each episode has its small but unobtrusive moral...
...Here, alas, his troubles really begin...
...As for the divorce laws, well yes, they are unfair to husbands...
...He and Elizabeth are mugged...
...Rose, I'm moving out of the house...
...is the successful creative director of Dale, Bowne, and Armstrong, a successful Madison Avenue advertising agency...
...Serious criticism would be inappropriate...
...Then Elizabeth's best school friend and her husband want them to play switch (a request they decline), and they witness a fatal automobile accident...
...Needless to say, he is revived, and his boss feels so guilty that he rehires him...
...As the husband's lawyer puts it (rather more succinctly than the author, I thought), "The law for husbands stinks, but it's the law...
...and the characters have just enough reality and vitality to keep the reader going...
...Harper & Row This is a work in mixed-media?a tract disguised as a schlock novel...
...She can only be up to no good...
...All of this shows them how tenuous and marvelous a normal life can be: "One man, one woman, a delight worth inscribing on stone...
...The husband, Peter Carmody, age 40...
...They are having an affair, and both are troubled by the halfness of the arrangement...
...It is well known that the wife takes all and that children are the most powerful weapon at a maddened wife's disposal...
...Peter has discovered that what he is doing cannot be called living, that he is bored, not in love with his wife and existing by habit...
...his boss tries to involve him in a kinky voyeuristic triangle—at which he fails so overwhelmingly that he is fired...
...Peter has been with the agency 10 years and is largely responsible for its glittering reputation...
...The combination is thoroughly commercial, given its subject: divorce law...
...By the time the novel opens, though...
...and his wife, on top of demanding all his money and property, refuses to let him see his children...
...By now, the schlock novel aspects of The Husband should be apparent...
...Miss Elizabeth Kilter, who is, unlike his wife, a "woman...
...He has also fallen in love with a pretty and talented artist at the agency...
...So when his wife's best friend drops dead one day, he courageously says, "I want to be living when I die...
...The real moral of The Husband's sad tale, however, it that a man should never marry his high school sweetheart, especially if she seduced him in the tenth grade...
...He therefore takes a bottle of Seconals...
...The fact that the plot is rather unlikely only makes the whole more commercial...
...Luckily, Peter has a fatal flaw (extraordinarily well documented in the course of the book): He has "never learned to stop the connection between thought and speech...
...The book is written with all of the skill such a piece requires —there is a sufficient amount of detail, both sexy and gory...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 9
