Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 19, 1993 TAG: 9306190130
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ANDY DUNCAN LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
James Thurber once said that between a good cause and a good play lie a thousand miles of desert. Rita Mae Brown's latest novel, the tiresome "Venus Envy," is buried in that societal Sahara, her characters suffocated by the burning sands of political piety.
In the opening pages, Mary Frazier Armstrong, a beautiful 35-year-old art dealer in Charlottesville, Va., is on her deathbed. As her last act, she writes letters to her family and friends telling them the truth about herself - including that she's gay - and the truth about what she thinks of them, good and bad. Then she finds out the hospital lab had a mix-up, and she isn't dying after all.
The recipients' initial reactions take the readers up to page 58, which is roughly where all narrative momentum ceases. Before I read "Venus Envy," friends were telling me what a great premise it had; I wish it had a plot as well.
Brown's comic sensibilities are dead in this novel. She sets up some slapstick scenes - fireworks running amok at a country club, Frazier playing golf through her mother's house - and then rushes humorlessly through them as if they embarrassed her. The one-liners all are on the level of "What this town needs is an enema" and many less printable rib-ticklers.
Mostly the characters just gas on and on about art, politics and society. At the Cut Above salon, hair stylist Terese talks about the homeless: "Sleeping down on the Mall now and in the winter, too, and Frazier, it's not just the drunks anymore." Frazier interrupts her gardening to tell a friend: "Mandy, if we ever forget what made this country great we deserve to fail, you know. It's the earth, the rivers. We're so rich we could be the breadbasket for the world." Momentarily letting her hair down, Mandy phones Frazier one morning and says: "I'm looking over the rooftops on Second and First streets. Reminds me of that Pis sarro, 'Pontoise, The Road to Gi sors in Winter.' "
The clumsiest characters are Frazier's antagonists. Libby, her unloving stuffed-shirt society mother, is a shrieking harridan. Libby's grotesque thrashings are unconvincing as well as unfunny; how many country-club types are this shrill and graceless?
In her final 60 pages, Brown abandons Charlottesville altogether for an extended erotic fantasy sequence in which Frazier romps around Mount Olympus with Venus and Mercury. She returns to Earth with a new credo: "Life is calling."
Indeed it is, and you shouldn't skip any of it to read a novel as ramshackle as "Venus Envy."
Andy Duncan is a News & Record copy editor.
by CNB