Review by New York Times Review
ON Sept. 24, 1986, in one of his published diaries, Alan Bennett - the British dramatist, screenwriter and master of the long short story - sighs over a spate of mixed reviews: "Well, one must take it like a man," he supposes. "Which means that one must take it like a woman - i.e., without complaint." Admiration for female stoicism abounds in Bennett's work, along with a desire, where possible, to engineer overdue rewards for heroines who have done too much suffering in silence. In "Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet," he makes sure his main character gets more than pedestrian relief from her new podiatrist. And in "The Clothes They Stood Up In," he nudges the uncomplaining Mrs. Ransome toward rejuvenation after a mysterious performance-art burglar snatches and then reassembles, in some other place entirely, every single object from the flat she shares with her tiresome husband. Bennett's philogyny made a notable exception for Margaret Thatcher in her heyday, but it has otherwise extended from "Miss Shepherd," the real-life madwoman he allowed to live for more than a decade in a van outside his house, all the way to Her Majesty the Queen. In 2007, he scored a hit with "The Uncommon Reader," a novella that imagined Elizabeth II's late-life discovery of reading: "As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on V-E night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognized with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it." Bennett's latest work of fiction consists of two substantial stories in one slight volume. Each carries a primly inoffensive title ("The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson," "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes") while the collection itself goes by "Smut," something he seems to regard as a fine tonic for the too tightly wound. And it's something of a triumph that the smut in "Smut" is not just the incidental sooty fleck. Bennett may sprinkle double entendres and fire off the occasional Tourette-like burst of blunt common nouns, but he really does manage to startle his supposedly unshockable modern readers with each story's very premise, slowly revealed and, yes, smutty. The "greening" of Mrs. Jane Donaldson, the 55-year-old heroine of the first tale, gets under way thanks to widowhood, which propels her into the work force. She finds part-time work as a "demonstrator" for the local medical school, role-playing various patients and relatives in exercises designed to improve the diagnostic skills and bedside manner of the "budding healers." One day she'll be called upon to portray a transvestite with knee trouble, the next someone whose mother has gone into a coma. The execution of these little dramas, rife with possibilities for cross-talk and misunderstanding, allows Bennett to draw on the sketch-comedy skills he acquired half a century ago with his colleagues in "Beyond the Fringe." But, more important, the hospital improvisations reveal Mrs. Donaldson's reserves of empathy and anger, a whole range of emotions stifled during her middle-class married life. Still, medical acting doesn't pay much, so she must also take in a pair of 20-year-old student lodgers who, once they fall behind on the rent, offer to make up the deficit by allowing their pleasant landlady to watch them having sex. The bartering possibilities envisioned by Mrs. Donaldson had been "running to housework" and gardening, but she's too polite to refuse what's actually proposed. At first she's a reluctant observer ("she found herself looking at the floor and wondering if it was time she had the carpet cleaned"), and so, truth be told, is the reader. But there's little disputing that voyeurism does our heroine quite a lot of good. Having a secret plumps up her feelings of attractiveness and self-confidence; she even acquires enough strength to weather the nasty realization that the lodgers have spilled her secret to the people she works with at the hospital. "What kind of person was she?" Mrs. Donaldson has begun to wonder. To Bennett's way of thinking, it's an excellent question, one he hopes will set his character en route from spectatorship to full participation. When he turns from greening Mrs. Donaldson to shielding Mrs. Forbes - adoring mother of handsome, narcissistic Graham; disapproving new mother-in-law of "plainish," capable Betty - things become a bit less kinky (for a while) and rather more dicey. Graham is surprisingly happy with his new wife, but he still enjoys being "Toby" during closeted gay trysts with "Gary," until Gary turns out really to be Kevin, a blackmailing policeman. It is Betty who takes effective action to protect not only herself and her husband but also her gorgon of a mother-in-law, with reasoning that further stretches Bennett's championship of women. Never mind the elder Mrs. Forbes's snobbery and possessiveness; she is "a survival and on that score alone her outlook and her armor-plated ignorance merited preservation." ALL, of course, is not as it might seem. Mrs. Forbes is actually less ignorant and vulnerable than she appears, while unflashy, competent Betty is hoping to sustain not only the satisfactions she gets from Graham, but also those she's begun to derive from an affair with his father. The elder Mr. Forbes had been getting up to speed with the Internet, enjoying chats with a "snake-hipped dusky beauty in Samoa . . . who actually lives in Clitheroe," when Betty came along to offer the more genuine and familiar article. Bennett rushes this second set of characters through a headlong kind of epilogue, showering them with farcical fulfillments or nasty surprises before leaving them to their own devices ("And so they go on"), muddling through and canoodling along. We believe in their continuing existence off the page because Bennett is so expert at letting them be themselves while on it. His characters may be types, but they maintain a deadpan unawareness of this fact, thus avoiding a theatrical pitfall their creator notes in his diaries: "The mistake in dramatizing Kafka is always the same: . . . actors and directors don't play the text, they play the implications of the text." Bennett himself often speaks in an old-fashioned narrative voice ("So in due course"), and he sometimes clots the cream of his prose with a syntax all his own, danglers and punctuation be damned: "Careful about money an offer like this would normally have appealed to Graham. . . ." For all his liberal social views, Bennett doesn't mind seeing vice continue paying its old tribute of hypocrisy to virtue: "The vicar likes you to pretend you believe in God. Everyone knows this is a formality. It's like the air hostess going through the safety drill." What counts is to keep the sizzle going underneath whatever suppressions we impose on ourselves. Imposing them on others is another, quite nasty matter, and Kevin, the bad, blackmailing policeman, will soon - if only in the interest of "narrative tidiness" - be finding that out. Bennett draws on the sketch-comedy skills he acquired a half-century ago in 'Beyond the Fringe.' Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including "Henry and Clara," "Fellow Travelers" and the forthcoming "Watergate."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 25, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Bennett is best-known for The Madness of King George (1991) and The History Boys (2004), acclaimed, sophisticated plays brimming with deadpan humor. This mildly smutty volume contains just two stories, which lack the barbed wit of his earlier work. In the first, The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson, we are given a peek inside the life of a prim widow who opens up her spare room to some horny young medical students more than willing to get creative with their rent payments. In the second, The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes, we meet an overbearing shrew who henpecks her deflated husband and micromanages her self-absorbed son's life, turning a blind eye to the semi-obvious fact that he prefers the company of men, even as he enters into a closeted marriage. Bennett's views of the repressed British middle class the keeping up of appearances, the slumbering vivacity of middle-agers, and the hidden shame of homosexuals seem at odds with the modern setting. However, most characters are crisply drawn and should please fans of his seasoned style.--Keech, Chris Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bennett's charming, sneaky little work of fiction, two novellas concerning two middle-aged, middle-class British matrons, unfolds in comfortingly cozy prose, drollery that entertains and implies an inoffensive yarn, allowing the unsuspecting reader to be gobsmacked when sex rears its carnal head. In "The Greening of Mrs Donaldson," a 50-something widow supplements her modest income by performing as a mock patient for medical students and by taking in young lodgers at home. When boarders Andy and Laura run short of funds one month, they offer to have sex in front of Mrs Donaldson in lieu of rent. Intrigued, she accepts their offer, "[a]t which point she had (and almost heard) that slow deep pumping of the heart she had not felt since she was a girl. 'Life,' she thought." When word of this reaches her employers at the hospital, the knowledge alters her persona in surprising ways. In "The Shielding of Mrs Forbes," the title character dotes on her handsome son, Graham, a banker who disappoints her by choosing for a bride Betty Green, older, wealthy, and "not nearly as good looking" as him. A turn of events so often used to end things happily is only the beginning of this twisting tale, as Graham, who has a penchant for random sex with young men, sleeps with "Gary," a male prostitute, the night before his wedding. Blackmail follows, and Betty teams up with her father-in-law to get to the bottom of Graham's increasingly erratic behavior. The story comes full circle when Gary visits Mrs Forbes. Bennett (The History Boys) finds abundant droll humor in his characters without patronizing them (quite the opposite; he's endearingly sympathetic), and captures the intimacy of a natural storyteller talking directly to the rapt reader. (Jan. 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Two charming novellas by British playwright, actor, and author Bennett (The Uncommon Reader) make up this slender volume. In the first, "The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson," a respectable widow gets her daily dose of excitement by delivering Oscar-worthy performances to medical students, playing the roles of patients with a range of medical symptoms and conditions. This keeps her busy until her lodgers, a medical student and her boyfriend, behind on the rent, offer her payment in the form of a sexual performance, allowing her to be the voyeur. Hilarity and self-discovery ensue. In the second story, "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," another proper but less sympathetic matron is dismayed to learn that her good-looking son is about to marry a woman she considers too plain for him. Never mind that the fiancee is rich and brainy. And never mind that her narcissistic son is actually gay. Protecting Mrs. Forbes from that knowledge becomes the focus of everyone connected to her. Hilarity and subterfuge ensue. -VERDICT As when Mr. Forbes gets turned on by murmuring naughty words like arse and fanny to his prudish wife, the smut here is of the tamest variety. Bennett's stories guarantee deliciously wicked fun. Recommended for all.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
