Worst Fears

From the hilarious opening to the satisfying final conflagration, Fay Weldon's Worst Fears is a taut, scathing revelation of the nature of marital intimacy. When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage to find her husband mysteriously dead of a heart attack and her female friends ominously invested in smoothing out all the complications of the tragedy, she begins to be suspicious. At first she attributes this to grief, then to paranoia. But she soon finds herself starting to crack, crank-calling her friends' psychiatrist, attacking people with kitchen chairs and breaking into their houses, searching furiously for evidence to confirm her husband's rampant adultery and her own worst fears. "A snappy whodunit of the heart....one of Weldon's best novels yet." -- The New York Times Book Review; "With a dash of murder mystery and a wink at Isben's grim tales of ruined marriages, this splendid and spiteful novel shows Fay Weldon to be in as fine form as ever." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer; "A hundred years hence, if people can still read, Weldon's books will likely have the unblunted edge of Jane Austen, an unsentimental Baedeker guide to sexual manners in an ill-mannered age. Fay Weldon breaks taboos like tape at a marathon, and she hasn't stopped running yet." -- Los Angeles Times.Amazon.com ReviewThe 21st novel by the "quintessential anti-romance novelist" Fay Weldon, Worst Fears focuses on Alexandra Ludd, a minor actress whose seemingly idyllic life in the West Country in England is turned upside-down when her husband Ned dies of a heart attack. Alexandra learns that not only was her marriage a sham, but that her friends and family are not as loyal as they seemed. When at the funeral her husband's mistress, Jenny, receives more sympathy than Alexandra and even her dog, Diamond, snubs her, Alexandra realizes it is she who has been shallow and vain, and embarks on a journey to discover what really sustains romantic love. From Publishers WeeklyIn Weldon's fictional universe, a character's worst fears are often not the half of it: the horrific reality of the situations in which her protagonists find themselves often go beyond anything they could have imagined. This is certainly true of Alexandra Ludd, a successful stage actress who is performing in Ibsen's A Doll's House when her husband, Ned, a theater critic, dies in their country house. Alexandra takes a leave of absence from the London production, only to find that her friends in the country all seem to be engaged in some kind of cover-up regarding the circumstances of Ned's death. It gradually becomes clear to Alexandra that her husband lived a very different and more promiscuous life than she'd ever suspected. As always, Weldon's fast-paced black comedy is as compulsively readable as it is unpleasant, but Alexandra's utter failure to have perceived any hint of her husband's real nature makes her remarkably unobservant, and her treatment of their son, Sascha, makes her seem outright cold-blooded, while those around her are malicious and spiteful to the point of sadism. The plot, which essentially adheres to Murphy's law with only a couple of unpredictable detours, lacks the cleverness or complexity to be found in such previous Weldon books about women scorned as The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil and Trouble. But even average Weldon is full of delights, and admirers of her witty malevolence will find much here to enjoy loathing. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.