Taller Women: A Cautionary Tale

The controlling image of Naumoff's ( Rootie Kazootie ) compellingly radiant metafiction about male-female relationships is the gridlock pattern of life. To survive, everyone in this indeterminate future time must learn to ``breathe differently, in short, hard gasps . . . to draw in all they would need.'' Monroe Hopkins, a 40-something emergency-room doctor in a North Carolina hospital, thinks he knows what's wrong with modern women--they've gotten taller. Taller women are happier women who don't need men. His first wife, Katy, was ``too tall,'' so they divorced. He lives with Lydia, but she's getting taller, too; he's looking for a shorter woman and thinks he's found one in 18-year-old neighbor Ronnie, who wants to move west and be a cowgirl. Other couples trapped in the same universe include Martha and Bob: she leaves him for ex-con Earl. They open a bar and hire an ``old-fashioned knife-throwing act,'' a husband hurling knives at his wife, tied to a revolving wheel (another of the book's vibrant metaphors). Caught in her own cycle of abuse, Martha sees this as ``just an act,'' even after Earl's buddies rape her and hang her from a balcony by her hair. In high fabulist manner Naumoff explores the male predilection for ``the ritualization of control'' of women. Some women (such as Monroe's first wife Katy) learn to say ``no'' in their search for freedom and self-control, for an ``unwrinkled expanse of order, and renewal, and faith.'' Others (like his new love Ronnie) head out for the Rogers/Evans ``happy trails.'' The novel is a scathing indictment of the way things were ``back then,'' i.e., now, a warning written in dazzling dialogue and enthralling prose variously reminiscent of Pinter, Beckett, Robert Coover and Nathanael West. (Sept.)