When Fay Weldon was asked what she thought about the magnificent public response to The Hearts and Lives of Men, the first of her novels truly to capture the attention of the American reading (and critical) audience, she said, "It's all very nice, but it's for the wrong book." I think Weldon was referring to the fact that Hearts and Lives originally appeared in the British weekly magazine Woman and that it was written piece by piece for serial publication. Perhaps she believed it less "literary" than some of her other works. Perhaps she was concerned that new readers would find her too frivolous, too glib. When asked why she decided to write a serial novel, she answered that Woman had approached her agent to see whether she would write a short story for them. "Being an agent," Weldon continued, "he said 'why not one a week?' and that's how it started."

Fortunately, Hearts and Lives does not suffer from the problems of disjointedness or frivolity that worried Weldon: It is a quintessentially and wonderfully Weldonesque novel. One of the best things about Weldon is that she has created a new category for simile. We can safely say, in response to the question "How are things going?" that life is like a Fay Weldon novel. This answer is all encompassing. Our lives become Weldonesque when the following elements can no longer be denied: that there is no such thing as coincidence; that justice—haphazard as it appears—is swift, satisfying, and ultimately inescapable; that we are none of us safe, however secure we feel; and that "to the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life, it is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keep us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them; we can throw them out if we choose."

The Hearts and Lives of Men can safely be called a comedy. The novel begins by telling us in the second paragraph, "There! You already know this story is to have a happy ending … Why not?" Has Weldon turned traditional? Hardly. She creates a comedy that depends on the inversion and subversion of traditional, masculinist comedy. She overturns convention in much the same way as the artist in her novel, John Lally, paints "the Rape not of the Sabine Women, but by the Sabine Women. It was they who were falling upon helpless Roman soldiers."

It is a story of love at first sight and of divorce, of black and white magic, of airplane crashes and near misses, of children abandoned and reclaimed. Helen and Clifford, the lovers whose catalytic romance prompts much of the tale's adventure, fall into one another's arms in the early sixties when people "wanted everything and thought they could have it…. Dinner, in other words, and no washing up." Their relationship continues through marriages to various people, including one another on occasion, over twenty years or so. They have "as good a chance as any" of "getting away with" a happy ending, but of course they might not deserve it. Who of us does deserve happiness? After reading this novel, such questions no longer seem rhetorical.

After reading The Heart of the Country, we realize that there is no such thing as a rhetorical question in a Weldon novel. Ask a question and (by God or the Devil) you will get an answer. The Heart of the Country is marginally a better book than The Hearts and Lives of Men. Weldon is in more familiar, more mythical territory where judgments are not weighed with caution and where we are not asked to have sympathy for the despicable characters, as we are in Hearts and Lives. Instead of opening with love at first sight, this novel (written before Hearts and Lives and already successfully adapted as a British miniseries) opens with the exclamation "Oh! The wages of sin! Natalie Harris sinned, and her husband Harry left for work one fine morning and didn't come back."

Natalie commits the usual sins of lust, pride, and envy, but she is cursed finally for the "special sin of splashing the poor." This is a modern sin, Weldon's first-person/third-person narrator, Sonia, explains. Sonia, instructed by her psychiatrist, is attempting to step outside of herself and look at herself as others see her ("that is to say in the third person") when she enters into Natalie's story. She describes the way that Natalie, driving her two elegant children to their private school in her Volvo station wagon, splashes unemployed, unhappy Sonia as she is walking her three children to the state school they hate. "'God rot her,' said Sonia aloud … she could deliver a curse or two effectively. God heard. God sent his punishment on Natalie. Or was it the Devil? He forgave her other sins, but got her for this one. Natalie committed the sin of carelessly splashing Sonia. Sonia cursed her. Misfortune fell on Natalie. Cause and effect?" Words have power in Weldon's reality. "One must be careful with words," she wrote back in The Fat Woman's Joke, her first novel. "Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits." Nothing is more powerful than language. Language is the stuff of love and, equally, the stuff of politics.

The Heart of the Country is an explicitly political novel, as is any novel dealing with getting benefits from the state (Natalie must get "tutorials on the Welfare State" from Sonia, among others.) Women shifted to the margin by society become political because they do not follow "the advice given to economically dependent female spouses since the beginning of time—wait for her husband to cease his wanderings, and be as loving as lovable in the meantime." Not unlike Ruth in Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the women get their own back. It happens during carnival. Carnival is comedy, right? But this is a women's comedy, and so there must be a sacrifice and not a ritual one either. "That was the purpose of the event. Burn a virgin, fire a barn, drown a witch. Clear old scores and start afresh! What do you think the carnival is about? Fun and games? Oh, no."

As for comedy, well, this book has one of the happiest endings of any I have read, acknowledging as it does that challenge, not stasis, is what makes for happiness; that comedy for women depends often on what was always misread as her pain, "that it is up to women to fight back, because the men have lost their nerve"; that, in fact, through the guise of dependence and sentiment "she had been laughing at him all the time." Weldon maps the territory where comedy and terror meet, consume one another, and create an altogether new landscape.