Population control

>> Hey Yeah Right Get a Life may be better than the pill

by JULIET WATERS

One of the funniest things about Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, and there are many funny things in this dark, witty book, is the way it's been packaged. The title glows in fuscia, lime and plum against a black background, creating a cover that's as minimalist and tempting as a free package of Japanese condoms. The back cover is a wall of blurbs from every major British newspaper calling the stories "audacious", "imaginative", "exceptionally perceptive writing," "sharp, poetic, witty," and "as big as the biggest novels." We are advised that "nobody who admires good writing should miss [these stories]". We are told that "Helen Simpson's ear and comic timing are perfect." And that she has written "a clutch of wonderful stories told by a true artist who deserves to sell by the squillion."

But there's little mention of what the stories are actually about. There's a reason for this. If anyone knew, it's highly unlikely they'd sell in the squillions.

These stories are about middle-class motherhood. And to say that Simpson doesn't sentimentalize this role would be a massive understatement. In a New York Times review, headlined "Honey, I Loathe the Kids," Jay McInerney wrote that a childfree British friend of his called this book the ultimate contraceptive, and gives copies to all her baby-crazed friends.

It's hard to figure out who would actually be motivated to read this without the eye-catching cover--certainly not the stressed-out mothers who populate Simpson's book. They wouldn't have time. As for those without children, Jade Beaumont, a cocky teenager, sums up the horror that exhausted, soul-shattered, guilt-drenched mothers inspire. "'They were like battery hens, weren't they, rows of tidy hutches, so neat and tidy and narrow-minded. Imagine staying in there all day. Stewing in their juices. Weren't they bored out of their skulls?' It was beyond her comprehension."

Simpson holds nothing back in her savage depiction. That her pen seems to be dipped in equal measures of poison and compassion makes the tales all the more torturous. Only the most hard-hearted would hand Jade a copy of this book, knowing that something inside her might recognize this as her fate. Yet at the same time you want to run out to every high school, no, elementary school and warn girls to start saving money at age 10. Maybe then they'll avoid the fate of Simpson's "suburban purdah."

A sample paragraph from the point of view of one mother, regarding her three children back from a rare outing with her workaholic husband, Max: "Here they came now, off the crazy golf course, tear stained, drooping, scowling. Here comes the big bore, and here come the three little bores. Stifle your yawns. Smile. On Holiday Max became a confederate, saying things like 'They never stop' and 'That child is a cannibal.' Their constant crystalline quacking, demanding a response, returning indefatigable and gnat-like, drove him mad. There must be something better than this squabbly nuclear family unit, she thought, these awful hobbling five and six-legged races all around her."

Dorrie, the narrator of the above paragraph, is actually the most tenderhearted of all the mothers in Simpson's book. They range from exhausted, brain-shattered, stay-at-home moms, to the soul-dead, hyper-organized yuppie mothers. From groups of mothers who pick each other apart in vicious gossip sessions, to pairs of mothers unable to hold a conversation because of toddler manipulation, to partners in crime who frequent high-priced haute couture boutiques as if they were opium dens.

Their lives feel as dark and menial as underclass characters from a Dickens novel. You wait for that redemptive moment, the bliss that makes it all worth it. It never comes. The only way you can frame their lives so that they're bearable is to remember, as Simpson points out, that at age 35, most of them are the "age of heroes in Russian novels."

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life by Helen Simpson, Vintage, pb, 197pp, $18.95