A Plan for Women

By Lawrence Naumoff

Book Overview

Good-hearted Walter is convinced that all women, like his mother and sister, sacrifice their hopes and desires for the men in their lives. An aging bachelor, Walter is still looking for that perfectly pure woman whom he can rescue from the inevitable corruption of men. He thinks he's found her. Many years his junior, Louise is sweet, and more important, innocent. All is bliss in their young marriage, as they live equally and happily in their North Carolina farmhouse. But when Louise's past resurfaces in the form of a sleazy, manipulative ex-boyfriend, will Walter's faith in his new wife survive the shock, or will Louise fall victim to the enduring plan for women? Writing about women and men with brutal, unflinching honesty, Lawrence Naumoff strikes a nerve in this tale of illusory love. A novel about the failure of the sexual revolution, A Plan for Women is "a thoughtful story written in a style both crisp and clever." (Kirkus Reviews)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156004526
• ISBN13: 9780156004527
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A frightening view of several male-female relationships

Naumoff presents several disturbing portraits of men and women together-none of them healthy, loving, creative, or finally rewarding. Is the sadistic overtly brutal wife-beater Manny really worse than the ingrown, rigidly moralistic, intensely manipulative Walter? So we wind up with the only "happy" couple being the alcoholic nymphomaniac teamed with the amnesiac man-child. Naumoff himself strikes me as manipulative and heavy-handed. For example, when Walter gave Louise a puppy I had no doubt that the dog would have to die in the course of the story. Characters were too one-dimensional for anything else to have happened. What was interesting was to see all the entwined and parallel couples jerked around (by the author) without getting their strings tangled.

An Oddly Disturbing Tale

I wasn't quite sure what to make of this oddly disturbing little book. I wasn't even sure whether author Naumoff likes women or dispises them. He pities them to be sure. All the relationships in the book are off balance, and even Louise and Walter, the May-December couple who initially adore each other, undergo a change that taints their relationship and makes them as unsettling as the other couples we meet. Naumoff is a fine writer, and I'd be interested to see what he does with other material. It is always interesting when a man writes from a woman's perspective. This one is skewed at best.