When Fay Weldon was finishing the manuscript of Life Force, she felt, paradoxically, at a loss for words.

"When the critics ask what the new book is about, what can I say?" she wondered. "I can't very well tell them it's about a man with a ten-inch dong, can I?" I suggested that she remind them that they always complained that she never fleshed out her male characters, and that here she does so with a vengeance.

The book does indeed deal with Leslie Beck "The Magnificent," as he is usually known, who is a catalyst in much the same way that Ruth from Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was. "Things happen because of Leslie and his sense of energy; he is slightly unholy, lower-class, ready to take on challenges in order to mount/surmount his destiny." Leslie is remarkable because "he likes women. And women never forgot him." Weldon had described a character from an earlier novel as someone who did not "regard women as sex objects, but thought of himself as one," and the same applies to this hero. The most seductive thing he says to women is "Tell me about why you are unhappy", and this is what draws them. The community of women at the heart of the book are all Leslie's past, present, and future lovers, bound to one another by love and betrayal, with Leslie simply an emblem of their connectedness.

Yet, as in all Weldon's works, the central questions here concern women's lives and choices. "Forget Leslie Beck," says one of the two narrators, "Were we good women or bad?" With her characteristic wit and her brilliant detailing of the everyday, even as she moves from the realistic to the fabular, Weldon has provided us with a book that is bound to become another classic feminist novel.

In the brief, cautionary tales in Moon Over Minneapolis, Weldon also questions the nature of fate and individual will, desire and imagination, as well as the relationship between the political and the personal. In a particularly effective tale titled "Ind Aff," the narrator falls in love with her older thesis director (married and the father of three children). She confuses "mere passing academic ambition with love," believing this man's assessment that she has "a good mind but not a first class mind." The narrator wishes to believe that this is "not just any old professor/student romance," but since Peter Piper likes to "luxuriate in guilt and indecision," and has taken her with him on a holiday to see whether they are "really, truly suited," we are certain that Weldon is indeed presenting the quintessential student/teacher relationship.

Desperately drawn to her teacher because he represents much more than he offers, the narrator must overlook his stinginess, his whining, and his "thinning hair" because he seems powerful and authoritative (speaking in "quasi-Serbo-Croatian"). She loves him with "Inordinate Affection," she claims. "Your Ind Aff is my wife's sorrow" Peter moans, blaming a girl who was born the first year of his marriage for his wife's unhappiness, absolving himself from blame.

Yet when they are waiting to be served wild boar in a private restaurant, she notices a waiter her own age, and, looking at this virile, handsome man, she feels "quite violently, an associated … pang." Having associated love with a sensation of the heart or the head, she describes this desire as the "true, the real pain of Ind Aff!" The waiter has no authority but does possess "luxuriant black hair, [and a] sensuous mouth." She asks herself in a moment of clear vision "What was I doing with this man with thinning hair?" Weldon, as forgiving as she is ruthless, concludes that sometimes we "come to [our] senses. People do, sometimes quite quickly." With her blessing, and informed by her wise wickedness, we are permitted to review, revise, and go on with our own lives renewed.