Among the Ruins

By Paul Gray

FEMALE FRIENDS by FAY WELDON 311 pages. St. Martin's Press. $7.95.

Chloe, the narrator of Fay Weldon's new novel speaks for all women who believe that their intellects will never free them from their biology. To her credit, Author Weldon sees high comedy in this complaint. Her characters--Chloe, Marjorie and Grace--do indeed twitch to nature's rhythms, but the thralldom of their bodies is endlessly amusing to their unfettered minds.

The three are thrown together as schoolgirls during World War II. Evacuated from London to escape the blitz, Chloe and Marjorie arrive in Grace's village, where class barriers have sagged enough to allow Chloe--daughter of a widowed barmaid--into Grace's country house and Marjorie's company. The intimacies of this time are not forgotten. The girls move on to separate but similar lives. They marry, miscarry, share lovers and the care of children. They remain friends, although Chloe notes: "Our loyalties are to men, not to each other."

Why? Chloe wonders, and with good reason. The men in their lives have been uniformly childish and egotistical. The women's bodies bear the scars of childbirth and abortion; men have etched humiliation on their souls. Faced with her husband's latest infidelity, Chloe decides to spend a day in London visiting Marjorie and Grace. They too are in their early 40s, their pasts a stream of errors. Grace has become a shrill hoyden, Marjorie an asexual careerist. They bicker and discuss each other's failings with a cool dispassion usually reserved for inanimate objects.

Weldon turns this downbeat visit into a romp. Whenever self-pity threatens the characters, another flashback washes it away. If these juxtapositions of past and present sometimes seem too easily ironic, the novel's breathless pace discourages dawdling over flaws. Its humor is wicked, in the manner of Waugh, whose comedy was also of matters as well as manners. The characters' resiliency is not less heroic for taking wacky forms. As Weldon proved in Down Among the Women (1973), she loves her sex because, not in spite of itself. sbPaul Gray

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