PAST SECRETS
by Cathy Kelly
HarperCollins, £12.99; 512pp
THE INTERRUPTION OF EVERYTHING
by Terry McMillan
Viking (June 29), £17.99; 384pp
HOW FAST CAN YOU hate a heroine? Is five paragraphs a record? That far into the new novel by the Irish writer Cathy Kelly, we discover Christie Devlin engaged in the sort of significant activity that an author devises for a character on first meeting: “She went about her chores, tidying, dusting, sweeping and wiping.”
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Six lines later, when the miniature dachshunds jumped on the bed, I had that Dan Brown moment, the point at which you want to fling the book in the bin before your neurons rot. But I had a duty to my editor, so I persevered as white-haired 60-year-old Christie made dried-flower pictures and thought about things that were exquisite, comforting and cosy.
Christie has neighbours. There is Faye, the single mother hiding her shame, Amba, her wild teenage daughter about to run off with a rock musician, and Maggie, the librarian who, when she was a teenager, wanted to be like the heroine of the American TV series Hart to Hart: “She was always so nice, so beautiful, she had a rich husband and never had to do housework.”
Although allegedly feisty, Maggie does not vomit when her lover says: “Beautiful women are like stockbrokers, always bartering,” nor does she pay attention when her best friend suggests that she get a life.
Somebody is reading The Female Eunuch, but to no end. Marriage and men, preferably men of a god-like, muscular and monogamous nature, are the only things that count with Christie and the girls. I had to check the imprint to make sure that this was not a classic reprint from 1936.
The comparison with Brown is apt because, for what she would call an unbearably poignant moment last year, Cathy Kelly’s last book, Always and Forever, overtook The Da Vinci Code on the bestseller lists. She lives in Co Wicklow, probably in a town called Stepford. Personally, my money is on a stealth initiative by Opus Dei to send women snivelling to the confessional for entertaining impure thoughts of full human status.
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If Kelly is trying on the mantle of Danielle Steele, Terry McMillan is having Mae West’s fishtail gowns remodelled. Since her debut in the Eighties with Waiting to Exhale, McMillan has created a genre of popular writing about black American women. Her latest, The Interruption of Everything, is at least an authentic witness to its place and time, and funny with it. The action is frequently blotted out in a hail of one-liners and nuggets of folk wisdom such as “ Opportunity knocks once but temptation leans on the doorbell.”
Our heroine, Marilyn, works part-time in a craft shop to support her compulsion to make rhinestone lampshades and at least has the grace to hate her exquisite, comforting and cosy life with husband, grown children and aging parents. McMillan’s typical early heroine raged against her deadbeat boyfriends; now it seems that, reader, she’s married one.
Marilyn thinks she is peri-menopausal, her husband buys a Harley and her mother’s short-term memory is ominously flukey. Wisecracking humour, however bittersweet, is not the ideal vehicle in this territory and somehow, as the gags whistle overhead, death, divorce and dementia are diminished to the importance of changing your hair colour.
Neither of these books seems likely to amuse the vast audience who grew up with glitz or graduated with Bridget Jones, readers defined by their contempt for the whole exquisite, comforting and cosy thing.
Publishing, like many other industries, seems to view the mid-life market as a Holy Grail, nice if you can find it but probably a myth. Maybe chick-lit readers move on to lit itself. Trust me, they’re not making rhinestone lampshades, nor do they care for heroines acting out housewife angst as if Betty Friedan had never lived.