SOURCE: "Losing to Despair," in New Republic, Vol. 203, Nos. 8-9, August 20-27, 1990, pp. 40-42.

In the following review, Dunford contends that Weldon's trademark anger has become tired and mechanical in The Cloning of Joanna May and Leader of the Band.

The twentieth century has made it easy for writers to see humans as nothing but poor creatures in a disordered universe. Fay Weldon has produced a line of witty, ironic books out of her prevailing sense of how unfairly the odds are stacked and how little can be done to redress the balance. Her characters dangle on strings held by some mad marioneteer, their lives pulled this way and that by cosmic spite, coincidence, the mandates of biology, the darker demands of society.

Weldon is like a hornet, buzzing angrily with topics, ready to be politically shrill about almost anything that comes up in the chaos of contemporary...