Misogyny and gullible women

Jincy Willett’s catchy title for her 2003 novel, The Winner of the National Book Award, is about a novel that did win the coveted award in the book. Willett’s didn’t, but is nonetheless worth the read.  The fictional winning novel is about the narrator’s portly, promiscuous twin sister, who, along with her spinster twin, befriends a poet and his wife, his old college roommate now a successful writer of salacious horror novels, and a small assortment of artsy oddballs.

While much of the book is about the amusing differences between the two sisters, these are highlighted by their relationship to the horror writer., Conrad Lowe. Conrad is handsome in a slippery, used-car salesman way, but possesses intelligence, wit, and a keen inerest in women. The wise, spinster twin shuns his flirtations; the looser twin falls in love.

The abuse starts on the honeymoon — verbal abuse, physical abuse, humiliations galore including Conrad’s tying her to the bed so that she can’t eat and will therefore lose weight. She is heavy, but healthy.  Her husband constantly humiliates her in front of the group about her size. But she is in love, she tells Dorcas, her twin, who urges her to leave him.

But a funny thing happens. Conrad begins to show attention to Dorcas the hook being needing her input on his work, she being a librarian. Dorcas, who has had absolutely no attention from men, takes the bait and spends an evening getting smashed with Conrad –drunk to the point of tying his shoe laces together under the table. She’s never been silly before.

Dorcas moves in with the couple at Abby’s insistence (to make Conrad happy and less abusive) and things go well for a while. Months pass.  Literary discussions occur nightly,  salon style. But Conrad slips into his old ways and is as nasty as ever even persuading the whole enclave minus Dorcas to have an “intervention” to help “save” his wife. It is cruel, but Abby gains strength through it, throws things, a kind of release happens.

Things settle down again. On Dorcas’s last night with the H.C. (Happy Couple) Conrad slips to the side of her bed, kisses her, holds her and . . .  alas, she rises and returns the embrace – with gusto. Three seconds later Conrad whispers, “Perfect” and leaves the room. She, of course, to her chagrin, knows exactly what has happened. This abusive man has done all this to prove a point. Not to Dorcas, but to himself: I am Conrad Lowe –destroyer of women. Another one bites the dust.

Conrad, though he has had plenty of women, actually despises them. His mother had been an actress and the young Conrad had been privy to her own many sexual indiscretions (indiscretions being mild.) He loved his father and hated his mother. Result? Women are evil. Mother must be punished.  The best way to punish women is with simpatico. “I understand. I feel your pain.”

After a separation then a reunion then more abuse, Abby calls Dorcas one day to report that there’s been an accident. She has backed the car over Conrad. Eight times! They laugh. The poet’s wife writes the book about Abby and Conrad and wins the National Book Award.

Through it all, both of the twins grow emotionally — Dorcas realizes that she, the old maid, is a woman and is suseptible to a man’s unique “gifts.” Abby realizes that she is an adult and need not suffer at the hands of a man, no matter how gifted.  After having starved to please him over their short, fatal marriage, she gains her weight back . After she murders him. In prison she’s happy.

The novel’s structure has some collage, flashback, and detours about New Englanders and “really bad weather” which are entertaining as backdrop for this grim, but humorous story.