Rules of the Game

By Gerald Clarke

FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE by Myrna Blyth Putnam; 304 pages; $9.95

The '70s have been rough on women who grew up in the '50s. Take the heroine of Myrna Blyth's fine new novel.

When Sara leaves high school, her mother presents official rules for the mating game: "First a watch, then an engagement ring, finally a wedding band. After marriage, a woman should get a mink stole, then a mink jacket, then a mink coat, then a house on Long Island." But by the time Sara passes step No. 3, the rules no longer apply.

The free-for-all begins when her husband William, an overpaid Manhattan flack, is fired. A former boss offers Sara an assistant editor's job on a supermarket magazine. Before long the new employee is made privy to one of life's worst-kept secrets: it is more amusing to work in an office than to keep house. Not long after that, she graduates to a bigger secret: power is fun, particularly if you've never had any. Morning after morning, William watches his wife lacquer her face, pull on her high-style boots and merrily walk out the door with his briefcase.

In the office Sara has two talents. She is a good editor and a better tease. Though nearly everyone on the staff of The American Woman is female, Neil Amberson, the top editor, is decidedly male, a discount sultan who sleeps with all of his editors once, then keeps them wondering why he didn't ask for seconds. Sara does get a return visit, in some of the raunchiest sex scenes in recent fiction, but it is all for nothing. She has misjudged who really has control of the magazine. Neil is on his way out, and Helene, his foul-mouthed assistant, is on her way in, exhaling the dragon's breath of women's lib.

When Neil goes, Sara goes. William, who has found another job, gets back his brief case and his power.

Blyth is a witty, often hilarious writer, and few have written more tellingly about the avian world of women's magazines. But For Better and for Worse is only half comic. The other half is a sharp, unblinking look at the ways of men and women, shorn of doctrinaire feminism.

There are no heroes or heroines, Blyth seems to be saying, just people, doing unto others what they would not have others do unto them. -- Gerald Clarke

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