BOOKS
reminding her
LO
make ice; he hired Ms. Murphy, even though she
lyped thirty words a minule and spelled "Fargo" wilh an
eon
lhe
end, because any woman wilh lhighs like hers deserved a chance to
make it.
455
Harvey, a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, becomes the
book 's hero, even though he humiliates Kate at every turn in her
struggle to reconstruct their marriage. The feminist rhetoric of Kate
and her "support group" echoes hollowly, for the bleak truth is that a
set of fortyish housewives can't really stand up to husbands who hold
all the high cards of money, social power, and sexual attractiveness.
The book reduces modern feminism to just another atlempt by Ameri–
can women to keep their errant mates in line by claiming moral
superiority for the female sex. Thus blackmailed, the men resort to
hypocrisy; but the women lie to themselves as well as to the world.
The Serial
falls back, finally , on a wry stoicism: life is unfair and
imperfect, so our best aids to survival are irony, a sense of proportion,
and the time-tested anodynes-when Kate exhorts Harvey to cut out
alcohol because "it gets between you and reality," he replies, with a
sigh, " I know." Cohen and Taylor are more sophisticated, but their
analysis is similarly dependent on the idea that "paramount reality"
always has the last laugh. The term itself they borrow from Peter
Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who state in
The Social Construction
of Reality
that "the reality of everyday life " occupies, epistemologi–
cally, a "privileged position ... impossible to ignore, difficult even to
weaken in its imperative presence." Such a claim is doctrinaire and
fuzzy at the same time: neither " paramount reality" nor "escape" can
be taken to denote some fixed referent, because each derives its meaning
from its relation of binary opposition to the other, and this relation
will depend on particular, shifting circumstances. Cohen and Taylor
themselves demonstrate how "self-conscious reinvestment" may trans–
form paramount reality into an escape route: a classic example would
be T.E. Lawrence's anonymous enlistment in the R.A.F. Once one
admits that different people have different ways of constituting para–
mount reality, it ceases to be paramount in the sense of a stable and
dominant structure of social meanings.
What is finally at issue is the nature of the "self" in modern
society. Cyra McFadden's suburbanites possess only the illusion of
individuality since they can want nothing spontaneously, but only
because fashion tells them they
should
want it. Cohen and Taylor
conclude with an even more sweepingly deterministic view:
