In Haskells Crossing, it is Julia who loves the women. She finds reality and comfort in their company—at bridge, on committees, in the seasonal cycle of parties all catered with the same six hors d’oeuvres by the same dignified family firm. Julia fits in, so snugly that Owen feels like a spare part. He is the husband, a figment to be evoked when she deals with male plumbers, carpenters, tree surgeons, lawn caregivers. “They resent dealing with women,” she confesses, “so I say you say this and that, and they perk right up.” In her feminine coffee-klatches, husbands are described as balky appliances, comically absent-minded and inept. Feminism has brought with it a cheerful misandry. Male refusal to ask questions when lost, male blindness to the most glaring facts of decor and dress, male inability to distinguish zinnias from phlox, or the refrigerator from the broom closet, male clumsiness at the simplest home tasks, and even, when the vermouth had been flowing, male sexual demands, so impatient, primitive, and lacking in stamina—these are merrily mocked. The genteel social surface of Haskells Crossing is gender-riven, and Julia likes it that way. That a married couple share a bed as well as a bank account is assumed but made little of. Husbands, who at meaner economic levels generate dependency and fear by rages and beatings, are here tamed by the impossible cost, in an old age rich in jointly owned savings and equities and real estate, of divorce. Husbands are superfluous, dutiful adjuncts to the busy interaction of women. Owen has no trouble accepting such a role, since his own father had struck him as similarly pathetic and unnecessary.

iv. Village Sex—II

It had been his father who had successfully urged him to get a practical, scientific education. Floyd Mackenzie’s experience of the Depression had been that engineers were the last people to be fired; he had seen it happen. “The kid needs to latch on to something practical,” he announced. “He’s in danger of dreaming his brains away.” The boy’s brains—demonstrated by stellar high-school marks and his ability, during his years of rural isolation, to entertain himself with books and pencil and paper—could be, he reasoned, best engaged by machinery, if not by the giant knitting machines, as long and heavy as freight cars, whose ill-rewarded servant he himself had been, then by some other kind of construction (bridges, dams, dynamos) whose indispensable utility was more obvious to the world than that of strict, honest accountancy. In a materialist age, matter must be trusted. As events proved, the machines of the future were to be lightweight—rockets leaving earth’s gravity and computers quicker than human minds, adjuncts of human subjectivity freeing us into an oxygenless space.