Mantrapped: A Novel [Hardcover]

Fay Weldon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Weldon, Fay | Publication Date: November 1, 2004

In her new novel, Mantrapped, Fay Weldon shows she's still on top as the foremost chronicler of this generation's sexual and marital woes. What would happen if a man were to wake up one morning as a woman? Or a woman as a man? Would his personality change completely? Would hers? After brushing past each other on the stairs above their local Laundromat, Trisha and Peter soon find out. Instantly, and mysteriously, they switch souls. Peter's now housed in Trisha's older and much curvier body, while Trisha's moving about in Peter's younger, trimmer form. But none of this is half as awkward as when they both come home to face Peter's wife and have to decide who will sleep where. Exploring her heroes' predicaments inspires Fay to recall certain points in her life, which she decides to insert alongside the novel, flipping back and forth between the two. The result is an inventive continuation of her critically acclaimed memoir, Auto da Fay, which flaunts her remarkable talent for pushing the boundaries of literature farther while always keeping it fun.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After many novels, screenplays, essays and an acclaimed memoir, Auto da Fay, Weldon now adds "reality novel" to her repertoire. Presented as a continuation of Auto da Fay, the book is a curious hybrid: something Weldon calls "novel and autobiography side by side, leaping from one to the other, but related." Its fictional protagonist is 44-year-old Trisha, who won the lottery, spent her fortune and is now relegated to niggling London poverty. Things take a turn for the worse when her soul exchanges bodies with that of young, handsome Peter. Now Doralee, Peter's life partner, is left to sort out an impossible situation, bemoaning the fact that there's no support group "for the transfer of your partner's being into someone else's shoddy, badly-looked-after body." These episodes are vintage Weldon: satirical, hyper-realistic and punctuated by biting truths. The autobiographical sections, interleaved with Trisha's story, are occasionally retreads of material from the previous volume, but mostly recount Weldon's further adventures as she juggles family and career. Weldon reveals the reality of her life behind her fiction, proving that "nearly everything you write about, you realize one day, has its roots somewhere in the past." Consider this the ultimate version of life and art imitating one another.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Things are never simple with Weldon. She created a firestorm with her last novel, The Bulgari Connection (2001), for accepting money from Bulgari in return for product placement. Now, after a fashion, she offers a follow-up to her wonderfully engaging memoir, Auto da Fay [BKL Mr 15 03]. In alternate chapters, she weaves together a novella about gender switching with autobiographical passages mainly concerned with the dissolution of her 30-year marriage. Some readers may wish for a more straight-ahead account of Weldon's marital woes, but perhaps out of boredom with her own life story or perhaps out of a desire to skirt painful personal issues, she has decided to pair her nonchronological reminiscences with a fictional take on gender roles. When Trisha and Peter pass each other on the stairs of a Laundromat, they mysteriously switch souls. Health fanatic Peter suddenly finds himself in the much older body of a dissolute free spirit, while Trisha feels liberated by her new trim form. However, Peter's wife is at first appalled and then intrigued by the many sexual ramifications of the mix-up. Surprisingly enough, this odd hodgepodge of fact and fiction is tremendously fun to read, due, in part, to Weldon's high amusement at her own shortcomings and her continuing ability to confound expectations. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117872
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117878
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,856,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fay Weldon's latest novel is worth the journey, January 22, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mantrapped: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fans of Fay Weldon will find MANTRAPPED gratifying. Others may find it trying. Half novel, half extension of her autobiography Auto da Fay, this book's typically atypical main plot concerns a soul switch in London between a down-on-her-luck, past-her-prime woman named Trisha and a vigorous, modern young man named Peter. Weldon alternates the tale of this unprecedented metaphysical event with digressions about her own past. "Novels alone are not enough. Self-revelation is required. Readers these days demand to know the credentials of their writers, and so they should."

Whether one considers skipping between novel and autobiography annoying will probably depend on how one likes Weldon's philosophical asides. Weldon has been writing --- ad copy, plays and novels --- for fifty years, and her observations about the changes in her profession are trenchant indeed. "It is not better and it is not worse: it is just different," she claims. But underneath her air of cynical resignation, one senses a nostalgia for the past, when men were Men (unapologetically inexplicable) and the vagaries of the human spirit were not so clinically explored. "Since Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in public, what is there left to be exposed?"

To return to the story of Peter and Trisha and the soul-switch, the mechanics of it are never quite explained. Peter lives with Doralee, an efficient, smart young magazine writer who secretly drinks tap water to decrease the likelihood of getting pregnant. It all starts when Doralee upends a vase on her bed, necessitating the cleaning of her mattress cover. "There was no time in her life for the agents of misrule; for accidents or inefficiencies, or cheap vases with not sufficient weighting at the base." Doralee sends the cover off to Mrs. Kovac's cleaners, along with a little black dress. But the buttons melt in the cleaning process. Mrs. Kovac sends it upstairs to Trisha, who has squandered a lottery fortune, and mends in exchange for a rent break. Doralee demands good service, and when her little black dress is late due to the melted mattress cover buttons, she sends the tractable Peter to pick it up. At the cleaning shop, Peter goes upstairs to fetch the mattress cover while Trisha is coming down, fuming at Mrs. Kovac's various presumptions. They pass on the stairs, and voila --- Trisha inhabits Peter's body, and Peter discovers himself stuck in Trisha's.

Weldon is a master of cosmic and comical sexual shenanigans. Despite the inherent difficulty in specifying which character is doing, thinking or saying what, she makes the most of the situation. (She finally resorts to using "the Peter body" and "the Trisha body.") After getting thoroughly drunk and trashing the cleaning shop, the two misfits return to Doralee, who naturally enough wants the real Peter back, but who nevertheless is not above making notes for a book about the subject that could make her career. She drags the childish pair from psychotherapist to priest, to no avail. Will the Peter body and the Trisha body have sex with each other, or with Doralee? How can they reverse a process they never asked for or understood in the first place?

I can't say I liked these characters, but liking the characters is never the point in a Fay Weldon novel. You come for the delicious, arch insights, the deadpan revelations, the quixotic observations of the things that nobody used to talk about. Now that orgasms are faked in public, the titillation of Weldon's prose may have lost some of its effect. But for this reader, it was still worth the journey.

--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Walled Books., February 1, 2005

By 

Paperback Diva "Heather" (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mantrapped: A Novel (Hardcover)

As an avid reader, it's a rare thing for me to put down a book before I've read it right through to the end. I've always soldiered on with the hopes that even a less-than-riviting read might get better as it goes. Not only did I put this book down, I very nearly heaved it at the nearest wall. (Hence, "walled books".)

I did make it nearly half-way through Mantrapped before I surrendered. The constant switches back and forth between the story of Trisha and the autobiographical bits were, I felt, not delineated clearly enough. Often I could not decipher whether I was reading about Fay or Trisha. Even something as simple as a change in type-face might have been helpful. As the author mentions having been told before,I found there WERE too many characters introduced in rapid succession and, frankly, the little 'cast' lists and introductions of a new character by putting the name in bold face did not help me much.

Having never read a novel by Fay Weldon before (nor heard of her at all, frankly), I wasn't particularly interested in reading her autobiography. I admit I only read a little bit of the description on the dust jacket before thinking "Sure, this looks like a fun little read!" and picking it up. Had I read more of the description, the promise of some insight and glimpses into the life of the author still might have intrigued me enough for a read. Unfortunately I felt the end product was poorly executed. Perhaps if I'd heard of Fay Weldon before and was familliar with her other novels and her work in TV I might have been more interested in reading about them, but instead the frequent name dropping and listed writing credits were more of an annoyance.

In summary, although I'm sure I've made it fairly clear, I did not like this book. At all. But, fans of Fay Weldon may well enjoy it, I suppose.

2.0 out of 5 stars too much work, April 14, 2005

By 

Falucchi (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mantrapped: A Novel (Hardcover)

I know of Fay Weldon, I figured this would be a "good read" -- and I was hoping for something better from her than the usual "chick-lit" clogging the shelves these days. I found myself skipping 5-10 pages at a time, not particularly caring what happened, until I finally decided to do something better with my time.

This book seemed to follow the idea of: "Tell them what you're GOING to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you just TOLD them." I felt I was reading the same thing, told 2-4-5-8 different times, and even skipping 10-15 pages, didn't seem to move the story... was there a story? Or was it just "ramblings from the writer's studio?"

If you've noticed how much Weldon has produced in her career, perhaps anything she churns out now is just deemed a "good literary work" simply based on her past performance.

If I have to "work" to get through a story, at least let me learn something, or experience something-- don't force me to try to make sense of what amounts to nothing more than meaningless gibberish, and call that "literature."