There's a Muriel Sparkesque quality to The Heart of the Country which I've felt simmering beneath the surface of a couple of Weldon's other novels, although it isn't always fully articulated. Here, however, you have much of the same interrupted tension, the same subtext of 'let me just tell you what happens now, so that we can dig into how it happens instead.' It's a habit in Spark's novels that I just love and I think Weldon also uses it to great effect. What's interesting, however, is that while Spark usually still has a huge jolt in store for the reader (often in the form of an untimely, unexpected, and somehow unfair or just totally random death) at the moment of her 'spoilered' climax, Weldon seems to allow the tension to build up and then just sort of peter out without ever really boiling over. This isn't true in all of her novels (see Puffball, a study in climactic 'oh-my-god'ness), but I think it's definitely present here, and I do recall a similar fading out in The Spa. If this sounds like a criticism, it isn't. Weldon's conclusions, or anti-conclusions, as the case may be, challenge our readerly desire for closure, I think—our tendency to want to see things wrapped up and tidy and settled. But sometimes, the story just ends. It isn't a pat, done-deal, and it isn't necessarily 'satisfying' in the way that maybe we want our narratives to satisfy. It's all about being in the moment with Weldon.There was another aspect to this novel that really stuck out to me. Namely, in certain of her novels, it is difficult to separate Weldon the author from her narrators, even if her narrators seem to be rather different from her in their circumstances (convicted arsonists in psychiatric wards, for instance). And I tend to think that it becomes the hardest to differentiate between authorial commentary and narrator POV when the subject at hand is women—specifically women who are not doing better for themselves. Women who have been conned in love, taken advantage of, or haven't learned to fight their inevitably unfair circumstances tooth and nail. Weldon (and/or her characters, I suppose) just has no sympathy for these women and she allows terrible, unjust, cosmic sorts of things to happen to them as a seeming punishment for their foolishness. It can be caustic and darkly funny, and it can be rather scathing and brutal. I'm not taking her to task for her feminism or lack thereof because firstly, plenty of others have gone down that path before me. But leaving that aside, I don't actually think she's obligated to be subtle (good thing, because she definitely isn't), and moreover, I believe that her grandiose judginess can be read with a dose of irony and satire and is also being manipulated in the service of very salient points. She wields a hell of a wrecking ball, Ms. Weldon, and god help you if you're caught within its reach.
