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Wendy
Harmer
Farewell my Ovaries
Allen & Unwin, $29.95pb, 320pp, 1
74114 564 3
WHERE
ARE THE great menopause novels? In The
Change (1991), Germaine Greer described
menopause as the ‘undescribed experience’,
but then noted that it had in fact been
described extensively, mostly ‘by
men for the eyes of other men’. Wendy
Harmer’s Farewell My Ovaries
is written by a woman for the eyes of
other women, but it does not really aspire
to greatness. It is unashamedly ‘chick
lit’ — or ‘chick-making-the-uneasy-transition-to-hen-lit’.
The chick/hen in question, Claire Wallace,
a successful singer and the mother of
a young child, is rudely surprised by
peri-menopause. Suddenly, she finds herself
‘a foot soldier in the great grey
army of menopausal woman’, an army
that has ‘chosen its own uniform
of blue, brown and beige, accessorized
with comfy shoes and an armful of white
plastic bags’. (The plastic bag often
comes up as a menopause accessory: Greer
also describes the ‘little grey lady
with a plastic shopping bag apologetically
threading her way through the gaudy prostitutes
and lounging boys on the pavement’.)
Claire rejects this vision of her future:
‘Fuck all of you! With your bloody
padded coathangers, lavender sachets,
rhyming greeting cards and stinking chocolate
rumballs!’ But what other options
are available? There is glamour as well
as pathos in the male mid-life cliché:
the red sports car, the racy new squeeze.
What is sexy about menopause? By definition,
nothing. Claire is not yet ready to become
a crone. Nor is she interested in becoming
‘a glove-wearing, turtle-necked Diane
Keaton’. Harmer doesn’t really
provide answers; her comedy, at its best,
is about questions.
The book begins, unpromisingly, with slapstick,
but Harmer soon moves to more comfortable
material — the shared currency of
life’s detail. She lists the contents
of a hand-bag, or the adolescent possessions
of the child of the 1970s: ‘a pet
rock, a boob tube, a Mao Tse-tung tea
towel, a pair of purple jumbo cords or
a transistor in a Coke can.’ This
is a ‘have-you-ever-noticed?’
Seinfeld routine, and its comedy lies
in the collision of two recognitions —
familiarity and arbitrariness — with
the implied first-principles question:
‘Why?’
Central to the book is a female friendship,
which is cloyingly full of collapsing
giggles and kisses, but which also allows
a weary veterans’ humour: ‘my
idea of erotic is being alone, just me
and my Maeve Binchy … in a bunker
in Afghanistan.’ Much of the book
reads like a stand-up routine: the anecdotes
are drawn in hasty, lurid brush-strokes,
redeemed by a punchline. The dialogue
works well, and moves at a cracking pace,
even if most of the characters seem to
be speaking like Harmer. It is a warm,
assured comic voice, less strained than
Kathy Lette, more laid-back than the gals
on Sex and the City.
Perhaps Harmer’s stand-up comedy
roots also account for the book’s
weaknesses. Stand-up deals in the abbreviations
of stereotype: stock images that the audience
can easily assimilate to get to the punchline.
Several of the central characters —
especially the men — struggle to
shake off their stereotypes. Connor, the
heart-throb, is more of an idea than a
person — but then, that’s the
idea. More problematically, Charlie, the
husband, is an amusing parody of oppressive
SNAG-ness — ‘Mister I Hear Your
Criticism and I Thank You For It’.
What on earth did Claire see in him?
Even more problematic are the segues between
the comedy and porno-lit. Harmer begins,
literally, with a bang, but it made me
whimper. I felt I had stepped into Mills
& Boon. All was salvaged — just
in time — by a punchline, but things
were looking ominous. Indeed, there is
a tonal inconsistency throughout the book,
as laughter gives way to heavy breathing.
Of course, in sex a misplaced laugh can
be terribly deflating. There’s that
scene in Milan Kundera’s Book
of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
where two men are evicted from an orgy
for laughing hysterically, even as ‘they
knew that laughter was as sacrilegious
here as it is in church when the priest
is elevating the host’. The whole
thing is teetering on the edge of absurdity
anyway; perhaps we need to treat it like
church.
The problem in Farewell My Ovaries
is its lurching gear changes as it seeks
three different responses: laughter, identification,
arousal. For me, it succeeds on two. Susan
Sontag wrote of Jean Genet that ‘the
author’s excitement precludes the
reader’s own’. Perhaps this
is the difficulty here: Connor is too
much Harmer’s own fantasy. It is
only when Claire remembers an episode
of lesbian sex, which disappointed her,
that the writing becomes more surprising
and more interesting: ‘she felt a
weird compulsion to climb inside Carrie
and pull the inner folds of her vagina
right over her head.’
A central question in the book is, ‘what’s
the best sex you’ve had?’ As
a tragic bookworm, I immediately asked:
‘what’s the best sex I’ve
read?’ Alas, it wasn’t this.
Any male lead whose eyes are ‘a remarkable
shade of blue-green’ is never going
to work for me. Barbara Kingsolver (whose
sex scenes were the only jarring note
in Prodigal Summer, 2000) writes
that ‘the language of coition has
been stolen, or … divvied up like
chips in a poker game among pornography,
consumerism, and the medical profession’.
I would add Mills & Boon, and cliché,
though perhaps these are subsets of pornography.
There are certain expressions that ought
to be outlawed rather than reclaimed:
‘shuddering heap’, ‘a cool
current rippled through her body’,
‘with one thrust he was inside her’.
Perhaps there was satire here, and I missed
it. I think of Harmer’s face, with
its vulnerability and sweetness and the
half turn of her mouth, as if everything
is partly amusing, partly sour. I would
have liked her first-principles comedy
to continue into the bedroom.
How did her book rate? For me, it was
a one-night stand: amusing, diverting,
at times regrettable.
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