Reversing Roles
LEVY, FRANCIS
Reversing Roles Regiment of Women By Thomas Berger Simon and Schuster. 349 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Francis Levy Contributor, "Village Voice," "New Republic" Thomas Berger's latest novel is set...
...One problem with Regiment of Women is that it is based on little more than the idea of reversal...
...The effect of comic disproportion should be like that of a magnifying glass that focuses our attention more clearly on particular vagaries of human nature that might otherwise have been taken for granted...
...The picture of a child nursing at a woman's breast is considered filthy and pornographic...
...One simply is not sure what Berger is up to in this burlesque...
...And no doubt it is necessary at least to start, as Berger has, with commonly held assumptions and stereotypes...
...The conflict between conditioned roles and innate inclinations, between choice and impulse, is a genuine problem for sexuality in the modern consciousness...
...At the end Georgie, who has been discovering all along that he is really physically stronger and no less intelligent or capable than most women, meets up with Harriet, who is equally dissatisfied with her assigned role...
...The two steal the Rolls Royce of a powerful woman senator and drive north toward the Canadian wilderness, where Georgie's male dominant traits are let loose...
...Pregnancy has not only been replaced by incubators, but sexual intercourse is a Federal crime and the belief is fostered that penetration of the vagina is fatal...
...In a moment of anger he jumps on top of Harriet, intending to kill her with his penis, only to find himself "swallowed alive by that which he would kill...
...There is something initially obvious in all satire, and therefore to be successful a unique tension must be developed between the theoretical and the concrete, the idea proposed and the life created within it...
...Georgie Cornell lives in fear of being attacked by dildo-wearing females (especially black women who are constantly after white men), and he always misses his anal therapy sessions with his woman analyst, Dr...
...Transvestism—men dressing in pants and cutting their hair short-is a serious crime punishable by detention or castration...
...To be sure, there is humor here that derives from a feeling of deviation, disproportion or imbalance...
...women with close-cropped hair wear suits, ties and jackets...
...Prine...
...One must be able to ascertain what are the masks and what aren't...
...Inflation has reached such proportions that the hero, Georgie Cornell, has trouble meeting the rent for a tiny Upper East Side apartment on his $1,500-a-week salary...
...Women are also the statesmen, generals and political leaders...
...Yet unfortunately, instead of opening up new areas of inquiry with its satirical treatment, the book's meticulously executed pattern serves rather to divert the author from the very questions he raises...
...The winos, perverts and rapists are women, too...
...Although there are glimmerings of insight into the factitiousness of outward sexual postures in Berger's futuristic fantasy, the reader is never allowed to penetrate behind the masks the author fashions...
...Muggings are so common that snatch-resistent purses are obligatory...
...And it is particularly effective in Berger's description toward the end of a hefty New England woman shopkeeper with "U.S...
...But all this serves mainly as a backdrop for the author's parody of current uncertainties and ambiguities about sexual roles...
...Few things work, not even toilets or traffic lights or elevators...
...Reading Regiment of Women one never quite knows...
...It is the men, naturally, who are now concerned about protecting their reputations and the women who gloat over their conquests...
...Marines" tattooed on her biceps, and of a closemouthed pipe-smoking woman gasoline attendant...
...Is his purpose to poke fun at present sociosexual trends (as in the beginning of the novel), to warn that what he envisions is in a very real sense inevitable unless mankind returns to its natural instincts, or merely to lampoon the typical es-cape-and-romance ending of some paperback novels...
...To a certain extent Berger's failure to go beyond cliches may stem from an unresolved question of ultimate intention...
...Completely missing, though, is any sense of a center, a principle of reason, nature or love to set off all the untruths, artificialities and grotesqueries in Berger's 21st century...
...For despite its predictability, an underlying inconsistency runs throughout the work...
...Thus in Berger's world men wear rouge and lipstick, dresses, stockings and garter-belts...
...Pollution has turned the Hudson River into a sewer and made gas masks de rigeur...
...Georgie Cornell remains little more than an abstract expression of sexual op-posites—passive and submissive at the beginning in women's clothes, dominant and powerful when he removes the make-up...
...Reviewed by Francis Levy Contributor, "Village Voice," "New Republic" Thomas Berger's latest novel is set in a grim 21st-century New York City...
Vol. 56 • November 1973 • No. 22
