A PLAN FOR WOMEN
By Lawrence Naumoff
Harcourt Brace, 259 pages, $23
Even standing just above an earthquake’s epicenter, you wouldn’t be on shakier ground than the terrain Lawrence Naumoff’s characters attempt to navigate. Since his first novel, “The Night of the Weeping Women,” Naumoff has mapped out in grand satirical strokes the pitfalls and pratfalls of contemporary relationships. Like any satirist worth his salt, Naumoff’s sense of humor is cynical and dark. His notion of a plot is to pull the rug out from beneath his characters and watch them fall–but we’re never quite sure we ought to be laughing because with all that slipping and tumbling, someone, of course, is bound to get hurt.
At the center of Naumoff’s fifth novel, “A Plan for Women,” are Walter and Louise. Walter is the director of Homes for Humanity in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is a compassionate and tender man, and he longs to make the world a better place, a place where people aren’t so run down by their toils and troubles. And women, Walter observes, seem to have gotten the worst of it, though he can’t for the life of him say why that is: “Why was it, Walter thought, that the faces of women seemed changed? More glamorous than ever, they seemed, at the same time, sad and degraded, as if the women had only recently discovered something terrible, as if these women were refugees from a long war. . . .”
Louise, though, appears to be something else entirely. “Louise’s face was clear and perfect and bright. She had a purity and strength beneath her chatty Southern femininity that made her attractive to Walter in a way no other woman had ever been.”
And the best thing about Louise, “a trusting country girl in a clean white nurse’s uniform,” is that she doesn’t even recognize why she’s so special. She “skipped along the surface,” Naumoff writes, “not knowing exactly what it was about her everyone wanted, not understanding how lucky the man who found her heart would be, simply enjoying life and seducing, in an oddly innocent way, everyone around her–her patients, her family, her friends, and Walter.”
Louise and Walter seem destined, then, for a perfect life–except that there’s another man whom Louise, in her oddly innocent way, seduced before she stumbled upon Walter. And this man, a sadistic English instructor named Rob, has a videotape that shows just how unpure, how degraded, Louise can be.
When Rob dementedly determines that Louise has betrayed him by marrying Walter, he re-enters her life, reminds her of Exhibit A, and succeeds in dismantling both Walter’s and Louise’s own notion of who she is.
Swirling around the central action of the novel are other characters who serve as compass points by which Louise and Walter navigate their lives and choose the path they’ll take. There is Walter’s sister, Mary Pristine, who is anything but. There are Louise’s long-suffering mother and cruel father. There is a woman named Shirley who lives in one of the houses built by Homes for Humanity just next door to Walter, a woman heinously abused by her boyfriend, Manny. And there is, in the latter portion of the novel, an amnesiac man who seems to summon in women the same response that Louise, before her fall, summoned in men. He’s so pure and innocent they just want to sweep him off his feet and eat him up.
Much of this action seems a bit perfunctory, underdeveloped, the characters not wholly in focus, their actions not entirely convincing. But “A Plan for Women” is, at its heart, a satire. We’re not meant to take it all too seriously.
Even so, there’s the matter of that videotape. After brooding over the awful turn in his and Louise’s life, Walter finally resorts to action. He concocts a plan to save Louise, to save his marriage, to restore his notion of what women can and should be.
The ways in which Walter succeeds and fails–the ways he and Louise both succeed and fail–bring Naumoff’s astute and ultimately moving novel to its fitting conclusion, reminding us again that observed from a distance, the machinations of our lives seem absurd and utterly comical. Up close, though, it’s a different story. Up close, you can see how we’re trying, with all our hearts, to get a steady foothold, to concoct a plan just to keep ourselves upright.
