A Plan for Women - Hardcover

Naumoff, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002312 ISBN 13: 9780151002313

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

Walter and Louise are a happy couple living the modern way in modern times, and Louise is determined to keep it that way, refusing to conform to old-fashioned female roles like her mother and her other female relatives had been forced to do in the past.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Naumoff is the author of six novels and lots of stories. He’s won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, a Thomas Wolfe fiction award, and the Walter Raleigh prize for the best work of fiction in North Carolina for the year 2005. His books have been published in Finland, England, Spain, Holland, and Germany, and he teaches creative writing at UNC in Chapel Hill. His novels are: The Night of the Weeping Women; Rootie Kazootie; Taller Women; Silk Hope, NC; A Plan for Women; and A Southern Tragedy in Crimson and Yellow.

Reviews

Again combining the notion of women struggling to define themselves against the images of men who would dominate them, Naumoff (Silk Hope, NC, 1994, etc.) enriches the mix with a family dynamic that crosses gender and generations. Walter, the soft-spoken, naive director of the area Homes for Humanity, single-mindedly devotes himself to the betterment of blacks in his North Carolina community--but on meeting the much younger Louise he discovers a new object of devotion. Hers is a captivating innocence, and she seems to him not to be flawed like other women, such as Walter's sister Mary, a divorc‚e whose predatory sexuality and alcoholic despair constantly provoke her strait-laced brother. Louise is taken with Walter's goodness, too, so the two marry and live in bliss--until an ex-boyfriend, Louise's night-class instructor and a man with depraved sexual tastes, threatens to send Walter a video he secretly made of the two of them together. Sensing that something is amiss, Walter confronts Mary, in whom Louise had confided; working together, they remove the tape from the pervert's collection. Walter can't resist a peek at it, however, upon which his notion of Louise as untainted shifts and their relationship suffers. Seeing her sadness, her mother tries to snap Louise out of it by confessing that her own years of sacrifice to her husband's whims had root in her guilt at having abandoned him and Louise, then an infant, for six months. Wiser but still unhappy, Louise becomes increasingly aware that Walter, like every other man, has definite plans for his woman. Some odd bits--including a male amnesia victim formally adopted by Mary and used as her sex toy--but a thoughtful story in spite of its quirks, written in a style both crisp and clever. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As engrossing as it is disturbing, Naumoff's latest novel is distinguished by its affectingly precise narrative of women's lives. These are scary portraits Naumoff paints, if in some instances a bit cliched. At the same time, a ring of truth sounds in depictions of abused and damaged women apparently stuck in the mire of unsatisfying, often toxic relationships. Still, in rendering the courtship and marriage of Louise and Walter--one loving relationship that we are compelled to follow as it progresses to the point of inevitable difficulties (which, in this case, happen to be the particularly ugly result of one man's sadistic, enraged power play)--Naumoff spins a web of words that is difficult to contemplate without getting caught in its powerful grasp. A tale perceptively blunt in its treatment of behaviors seemingly governed by societal mores and the resulting ill-fitting bonds between men and women. Alice Joyce

Naumoff (Silk Hope, LJ 5/15/94) documents the regression of two lovers, setting Louise's initially happy life with Walter against those of "trapped" women such as her mother and her neighbor Shirley, who spend their days in servitude to their husbands. The lovers live in Eden-like bliss until Walter finds out about Louise's sexual history. Because Walter has "saved" her from her past, he finds it easy to seek dominance over the perpetually guilty Louise. What is more, Louise's sister-in-law reveals the impossibility of breaking these relationship patterns through her farcical friendship with an amnesiac. Naumoff writes with a traditional male-centered, romantic view of woman as either virgin or whore. His attempt to freshen stereotypes results in a trite perpetuation of them. The discerning reader will tire of his commentary on women's victimization. Not recommended.?Judith Ann Akalaitis, Chicago
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151002312
• ISBN 13: 9780151002313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 259