Review: The Kept Woman by Mack Reynolds

Click on cover to view
on Amazon

The Kept Woman is also available in epub format from Google Books

 I grew up reading Mack Reynolds' science fiction and was intrigued when Fiction Hunter Press published The Kept Woman. Apparently Reynolds' publisher asked him for some sex books and this is one of the five he wrote. It was published in 1963.

I didn't know what to expect when reading this book but I think it holds up surprisingly well. In large part, this is due to Reynolds being a good writer and he doesn't dumb down his writing because the story has a sex theme.

 Joanne (Jo) Cotton and her fiancé, Jack, each inherit $5,000 from her godmother. Jack wants to use the money to put a downpayment on a house and start moving up the social ladder in Cuma Indiana. Jo wants to live, travel the world, have fun, be a bum. Jack reluctantly agrees that Jo should use her inheritance to travel Europe and get it out of her system while he will invest his half in the company he works for, Cuma Tabulators. He's convinced she'll return, take her old secretarial job, and they'll get their big house on Watson Hill.

Jo heads for Europe where she lives the expatriate life, hanging with jet setters, invited to Scottish castles and yachts. Then a year later, she wakes up and realizes that she's broke. Drowning her sorrows in the hotel bar, Jo meets Mike Lapine, a wealthy business man from Scranton PA, in Europe on doctor's orders to relax which he doesn't seem able to do. Mike makes Jo an offer. He'll support her lifestyle and she will teach him to relax and blend in with Europeans. And so she becomes a kept woman, enduring Mike's clumsy animalistic sex and in return she continues to have clothes, travel, and the society she loves.

I said above that Reynolds didn't dumb down his narrative just because he was writing a sex book. In other writing Reynolds had socioeconomic and sociological themes and that carries over here. Added to that is his own experience living outside the US.

Reynolds starts off with a sly nod to IBM. Jack works for Cuma Tabulating. IBM began as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company. If that is too subtle, the place to live in Cuma is Watson Hill. and Thomas J. Watson was chairman and CEO of IBM.

Businessman Mike Lapine is loud, boorish, insulting to everyone not an American, and believes that puling out a roll of bills will solve anything. He's the stereotypical ugly American, convinced America does everything better but actually pretty ignorant about everything. Jo has her work cut out trying to put at least a veneer of culture on Mike. At one point she schools on currency valuation when he begins a rant about the almighty dollar. This does two things: we see that Jo has a brain despite the impression you might have about someone willing to barter her body; and Reynolds inserts a bit of economic reality. 

Reynolds himself lived outside of the US for over ten years and so was familiar with the expatriate life. He supported himself with his writing which included articles about his travels. I think there is a little bit of Reynolds' in the struggling free lance travel writer, Bart McGivern, who Jo meets on Majorca Reynolds, like Bart, wrote travel pieces to support himself. Bart's writing becomes a fun little sub plot in the novel and take a poke at writers thinking that one day the will write The Great American Novel. And Reynolds being the kind of writer he is, we get a short lesson on the economics of being a freelance commercial writer.

Eventually Jo is confronted with her past, present, and future and needing to decide what will make her happy.

While The Kept Woman has a strong sexual theme, it is more than perky bosoms, bottoms, shapely legss, and  hot thrusting loins though those do figure into the story aplenty. Rather Reynolds has taken a sex book and infused it with intelligent observations and commentary and given us a female character who is a lot more than a gold digging bimbo. It holds up very well after 50+ years and would only require adding mobile phones and an increase in the amount of money needed to live the expatriate life to bring it up-to-date. It's a fun book and has inspired me to look up more of Reynolds' writing.

Keywords: expatriates, sex, pulps, erotic stories