September 30, 1984  Looking for Love After Marriage  By Fay
Weldon.  In her remarkable tour de farce, "The Life and Loves of
a She-Devil," Fay Weldon has taken the subject of revenge and
given it play. Ruth, a humble and lumpish good wife and mother,
has been doing her best, in spite of daily humiliations, to
please her smug accountant husband, her two unpleasant children,
a dog, a cat and a guinea pig, all of whom populate her domestic
paradise. But when her handsome and sexy husband, Bobbo, ditches
her for Mary Fisher (a fisher of men), a glamorous authoress as
blond and dainty as the heroines of the romance novels she sells
by the millions, Ruth has had enough. Let me say, right off,
that there are no lovable characters in this fable, and so what!
A book is not a massage, it is some kind of message:
particularly when the book is a parable written to illustrate a
moral and to demonstrate the witty ins and outs of the author's
mind. Why else write such a tale of woe?  "The Life and Loves of
a She-Devil" has