Shenanigans

By Paul Gray

LEADER OF THE BAND by Fay Weldon

Viking; 196 pages; $18.95

Sandra Sorenson, 42, is an astronomer who is quasi famous for having discovered a new planet in the solar system. She appears once a month on late- night British TV to discuss the universe, and has been dubbed "Starlady Sandra" by the tabloids. But recognition does not satisfy her, and neither does her husband Matthew, an ambitious lawyer and tepid bedmate ("What's good enough for missionaries is good enough for me"). So Sandra does what any woman in her fix would do: she runs off with Jack Stubbs, the trumpet player in a ragtag band called the Citronella Jumpers.

This premise of Leader of the Band suggests why Fay Weldon, 55, remains an engaging outsider among the generous circle of contemporary feminist writers. Her twelve previous novels feature a number of heroines unsettlingly prone to confirming male stereotypes about the opposite sex. These females gossip, backbite, succumb regularly to the rhythmic fluctuations of their metabolisms. Having achieved some measure of independence or success, they are likely to throw everything over for some handsome rotter or an insincere promise of love and security. Starlady Sandra knows that her new passion will demand the suppression of her lively intelligence: "If only I can hold my tongue I might yet be the one he keeps in his bed, for ever. Craven, yes indeed, but there it is. My female lost to his male."

Yet Sandra, like most of Weldon's women, manages to wrest victory out of surrender. For one thing, she tells the story of her flight from boring respectability to middle-aged hedonism with bawdy, invigorating wit; silence may be her best defense in the presence of her new lover, but she is irrepressibly outspoken when she sets pen to paper. "Look, I'm really something, me," she tells herself. "And also I am nothing," she continues, in a characteristic about-face. "I am the debris of the world, product of a series of unconsidered and unnatural matings, between the proud, the mad and the murderous."

By this she means the peculiar twain of her parentage. Her father had been a Nazi officer, labeled the "Mad Sadist of Bleritz" for his genetic experiments in a concentration camp and executed after being tried at Nuremberg. One of his victims was the half-gypsy girl who became Sandra's mother. She was, the daughter notes ironically, "really lucky, and was all of 15 when I was born, at the very end of the war." Sandra, of course, never knew her father, and the mother who raised her was demonstratively sinking into madness. Given the bizarre facts of her conception, the heroine has - created for herself a special identity: "I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes." And her mission in life is clear, at least to her: "I make myself deaf to the pleas of the unborn. As many as my father brought into existence, I will keep out of it."

The introduction of eugenics into what was supposed to be a story of Sandra and Jack's illicit sexual shenanigans may seem jarring. That is Weldon's intention. Once again she has written a memorable novel about a woman who tries to be a flibbertigibbet and falls short -- collapses, in fact, between the demands of spirit and flesh into the gloriously common muddle in between.