A bas la différence!

Kathy Lette’s latest novel begins with a zany one-liner: ‘How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?’ The next sentence is a zany one-liner: ‘God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.’ The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth. Aaagh! Wacky one- liners choke the book, rendering the reader gasping for gravity. They elbow aside both plot and characterisation, which is just as well, because the plot is profoundly absurd and the characters are clichéd cartoon cut-outs.

Shelly, a schoolteacher, suddenly finds she is about to marry a total stranger, handsome American Kit, ‘butter-blond with a chiselled physique’. She had no idea that her pupils had put her name down for a reality television show, Desperate and Dateless. The prize is a wedding in Gretna Green. Shelly blithely gets married, has oral sex and flies off to the French-speaking island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean for the honeymoon, camera crew in tow. She’s ‘riding higher than the polyester underpants beneath her new Versace skirt’.

Once they get to Réunion, Kit refuses to consummate the marriage. This is upsetting for Shelly who masturbates so much she needs ‘terry towelling sweatbands on her wrists’. The newly-weds while away the pages exchanging ceaseless quips which Kathy’s devotees describe as a ‘savagely funny indictment on the sex war’. Judge for yourself:

‘All you gals are ponderin’ is why your idiot boyfriend won’t put the toilet roll on with the serrated bit facin’ out.’ ‘Ha! Men don’t ever put the toilet roll on! A man’s idea of changing a toilet roll is to put it on the back of the cistern.’