Regiment of Women by Thomas Berger

Twenty-nine-year-old Georgie Cornell, the hero of Thomas Berger's new novel, was born in 2096 and lives in New York City. The doorwoman of Georgie's apartment house, "in the jungle of the East 70's," womans the front-door antipollution airlock with a shotgun. Georgie's psychiatrist, Dr. Prine, wears a selfadhesive nylon beard and has been treating Georgie for frigidity with a dildo. She tells him his complaint that it hurts is merely a "defense"as Dr. Daisy Rudin explained so well in her new book on the superiority of the anal orgasm, recently published by the giant firm where Georgie works as a secretary, unsuccessfully avoiding the attempts of his bald-headed boss, Ida Hind, to steal glances into Georgie's blouse at his newly siliconed breasts. Through such details of satiric reversal, parallel, and extension, Berger first sketches in the background of his future America. The novel's title is taken from John Knox's 1558 attack on "Bloody" Mary Tudor, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, and quotations from Knox, Martin Luther, Christabel Pankhurst, Grover Cleveland, Olive Schreiner, Confucius, Virginia Woolf, and others, including a final comment from Friedrich Nietzsche ("Woman was God's second mistake"), preface each chapter. Georgie Cornell's America is governed entirely by women ("regiment" in Knox's title means "rule"); and in Georgie's New York men swear by Mary rather than Christ (whether Bloody or Virgin is unclear), admire Leonarda's Mono Liso, celebrate Columba's Day, and look forward patriotically to their six-month service at Camp Kilmer, where they are milked daily by sperm machines to insure the continuance of the species. (Normal intercourse in Georgie's world involves women taking men anally with dildoes, and the troubles for which Georgie is seeing Dr. Prine seem to have begun during a disastrous Junior Prom date when he was 18.) The ruling women of 2125 haven't done very much better than the ruling men of today. The city and the society in Regiment of Women are basically chaotic and inefficient rather than inhumane or totalitarian. The George Washington Bridge collapsed years before into the Hudson Sewer during a rainstorm, and the general decay of 22nd-century America seeps into every part of the novel. Unlike the antiseptic dreams or nightmares of the future usually displayed in science-fiction

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novels, the atmosphere of Regiment of Women is incredibly seedy, as if Berger envisioned the world of the future as an extension of the back alleys of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, or of Ross Macdonald's decaying southern California towns. But Regiment of Women isn't merely an extended tour through a turnabout world that readers will view with disgust or approval according to their prejudices. To paste up a collage of the details of Regiment of Women falsifies the actual effect of the novel, which convinces almost in spite of the details. In Berger's novel Little Big Man Jack Crabb tells how he first couldn't stand the smell of the Indian village: "But, like anything else, living in it made it your reality, and when I next entered a white settlement, I missed the odor of what seemed to me life itself and felt I would suffocate." Berger's imaginative power makes us live in Georgie Cornell's reality until it becomes our norm, and the arbitrary rigidity of the sex roles in Georgie's world makes us aware not of our "normality," but of our own arbitrary distinctions. There is more compassion than bitterness in Regiment of Women. Berger's subject is not so much the specific nature of sexual roles as the categorical severity with which roles are enforced and deviations punished. The decay of Georgie Cornell's America implies that the more politically and socially fragile a society, the more severely it attempts to police and define individual nature. Berger's settings and characters in all his novels are plausible rather than apocalyptic. His satire refuses to make an alliance between reader and author against an oppressive, ugly "them." Paul Krassner once wrote that "the ultimate object of satire is its own audience," and Berger's integrity arranges that no reader male chauvinist, militant feminist, or anyone in betweencan emerge from Regiment of Women unscathed. All of Berger's main charactersGeorgie Cornell here, Jack Crabb in Little Big Man, Carlo Reinhart in Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, and Vital Partsare moved more by circumstances than by some passionate belief. Berger's clearest outrage is reserved for anyone who presumes to sit in moral judgment on another, and his central characters are all slammed about by beings more certain than they about the location of truth. Consequently, there is little ideological significance to Georgie's journey from the New York in which he is a brow-beaten secretary to the Maine lake where he discovers he can put his penis into a woman's vagina without killing her. Along the way Georgie is manipulated as much by the underground men's liberation movement as he is by the female government. "Everyone he encountered was a monomaniac of some sort, working compulsively to affect someone else: to alter their personality, change their mind, catch them out, set them straight. Everybody else always knew better about sex, society, history, you name it." Georgie's resolution of his problems is purely individual, the affirmation of personal identity that for Berger must precede the definition of sexual identity. Like all great literary satirists, whose art gets at the root of imperception and self-delusion, Berger is concerned with the way language can falsify reality. ("I was never an aggressive boy," says Georgie. "I certainly don't think I could be called effeminate.") By disorienting us through its language, Regiment of Women indicts the society that uses language as a tool of oppression, making purely verbal

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differences into codes and categoriesrhetoric asserting and experiencing itself as truth. Berger's own style, with its tendency to absorb the speech rhythms of his characters and its unwillingness to stand apart from them, is especially suited for such themes. Since Little Big Man, especially, he has concentrated on exploring the possibilities and revealing the secrets of everyday language with a deep wit and feeling that transform our awareness of the language we really use much more than does the flamboyance of a writer bent on asserting his personal style. Killing Time may be Berger's most successful effort to engage in this most truly poetic task of renovating the language we speak. But Regiment of Women is a flame from the same sources of energy. Regiment of Women is in many ways a difficult book to talk about because, like the popular novels it imitates, it has few of the philosophical nuggets or technical tricks that professedly serious novels kindly include for the reviewer's convenience. But Berger doesn't use popular forms archly, as does, for example, Donald Barthelme. He finds in them energy, action, and simple decisions that are motivated more by self-preservation than by abstract moral or intellectual imperatives. Berger also concocts this combination gothic-horror, science-fiction, and detective story to explore and reveal a theme such works have always been fascinated bythe masculine fear of the domination of women. Berger uses these forms in the service of what I think is a compelling and finally humanizing fiction about male and female weakness perceived as human weakness, and about the potential strength of individual identity that the official and underground institutions of society equally ignore. Regiment of Women is a brilliant accomplishment by one of our best novelists. Little Big Man, and perhaps Killing Time and Vital Parts, are among the best novels of the past 10 years. Next to these larger achievements, Regiment of Women may be more a fable, a deceptively simple romp through current prejudices. It isn't great in the way greatness has been defined by the novel since Joyce: each one a block-buster containing, as far as possible, all knowledge and experience. None of Berger's works is suitable for taking to the moon with matching toothbrush. They are novels that help you maintain a fresh response to the world around you. With Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey seemingly stilledand Richard Condon plunged into self-parodyKurt Vonnegut may be closest to Berger in style if not sensibility; but Vonnegut lacks the edge of Berger's wit and the variety of his insights. Each of Berger's novels is an expression of an esthetic presence that continues to grow in strength and importance. Regiment of Women, for all its exaggeration and grotesque parody, has been imagined with such ferocity and glee that we assent to it almost in spite of ourselves, celebrating with Berger that anarchic individuality that outlasts all the forms that language and society attempt to impose upon it. [1973]