[In the following review, Koenig provides a summary of The Change and Greer's unconventional ideas. Koenig concludes, “it's unlikely that many readers will march behind Greer's custom-made banner.”]

No one following Germaine Greer's work would expect her to go gently into that good night—or anywhere else—but even her most devoted readers may not be prepared for the way she takes leave of her youth. “The stereotype of the snowy-haired granny beaming affectionately at her apple pie,” she says, “needs to be balanced by her dark side, with ‘tangled black hair, long fingernails, pendulous breasts, flowing tongue between terrible fangs.’”

A witch may be a daunting model for the average rider of the IRT, but Greer has plenty of others: philosopher, artist, menopausal femme fatale. In The Change, she not only upsets the applecart of received wisdom but uses its scattered contents to pelt the media, the medical establishment, and others who give the aging female a view of herself that is unrealistic and depressing. “The purpose of this book,” Greer states, “is to demonstrate that women are at least as interesting as men, and that aging women are at least as interesting as younger women.” At 53, she has written a lively, provocative, and funny guide for the baby-boomers wondering nervously about life on the other side of the hill.

Greer has less than no time for those who protest “ageism”: Calling old a dirty word, she says, is offensive in its assumption that there is no value in aging, just as those who insist there is no difference between men and women demean inherently female qualities. Worse than the practitioners of Newspeak are the Jane Fondas, Joan Collinses, and Helen Gurley Browns, so many stretched and painted and grimacing corpses dangled before us as examples of how boundless expenditure and tireless energy can procure eternal youth.

Worse still are the doctors, male and female, who treat menopause as a terrible disease rather than as a natural transition (one surgeon Greer quotes says that women of that age “are no longer women”) and prescribe painful, extreme, and often irrelevant (though not necessarily inexpensive) treatments. Nineteenth-century patients were treated with electric shocks to the uterus, early-twentieth-century ones with a bombardment of X-rays. Today, women nearly twenty years past the safety limit are prescribed oral contraceptives; they are given hormone-replacement therapy, about which too little is known; and, at the first sign of trouble, they are often told to have their wombs carved out.

While Greer does not deny that menopause can bring with it many distressing physical symptoms, she feels that hysteria over the change has been induced by our patriarchal and sex-mad society. To the worry that older women are not attractive to men, Greer has a two-part response: Yes, they are, and If not, so what. In a chapter entitled “Sex and the Single Crone,” Greer considers the cases of Colette (who at 51 met the 36-year-old man with whom she lived until her death 30 years later) and George Eliot (who at 58 married a man 20 years younger). Elsewhere, she tells us about Diane de Poitiers, who was two decades older than her lover, Henri II, and Ninon de Lenclos, the seventeenth-century courtesan who, in middle age, seduced the son of one of her former conquests.

If your personal charms are not up to those of a French king's mistress, however, Greer counsels you not to be envious of menopausal women with husbands or boyfriends. She sees the emphasis on sex in the twilight years as emanating from men, who believe that the main purpose of women is to gratify their own sexual needs. But, Greer asks, do men care that much about making women happy? “If [a woman] is one of the many women who have been f———ed when they wanted to be cuddled, given sex when what they really wanted was tenderness and affection, the prospect of more of the same until death do her part from it is hardly something to cheer about.” Greer says that the menopausal woman's fractiousness and instability may result not from hormonal changes or unhappiness at losing her sex appeal but from “justifiable rage too long stifled and unheard,” anger at the years of self-sacrifice and repression of desire that bursts forth when a woman finally decides to put her own wishes first.

Instead of pills, plastic surgery, and other remedies designed to make them more pleasing to men. Greer advises women to enjoy the company of other women, to take up gardening, religion, and homeopathy, and to brood less about their pimples and more about the mystery of existence. “Women who do not adhere to a particular creed will nevertheless find that in the last third of their lives they come to partake of the ‘oceanic experience’ as the grandeur and the pity of human life begin to become apparent to them. As one by one the Lilliputian strings that tie the soul down to self-interest and the short view begin to snap the soul rises higher and higher, until the last one snaps, and it floats free at last.”

While writing as spirited as this is itself exhilarating, many of Greer's attitudes are self-interested, her premises contradictory. Greer's descriptions of older men as smelly and ugly (and, therefore, unfair in demanding that their mates be alluring) partake of the same sort of sexual materialism for which she criticizes them. She will also inspire few readers with her examples of menopausal success stories—all more remote than Hollywood harpies. For Greer, a woman who takes a new career path is not someone who designs stationery or goes to law school, but Baroness Blixen, who at 48 became Isak Dinesen. Nor does Greer acknowledge that the rising of the soul—not to mention prolonged bouts of contemplation and gardening—is considerably assisted by the serenity and free time that accrue from a large bank account. Essentially, Greer's program for the good life after 45 seems to be women for friends and a boy for sex, one that will not suit those who don't share her allure, money, or misandry. As polemics go, The Change is bright and brassy, but it's unlikely many readers will march behind Greer's custom-made banner.