SOURCE: "Divine Justice," in New York Times Book Review, June 29, 1997, p. 29.

In the following review, Mason calls Weldon "one of the most cunning moral satirists of our time."

Fay Weldon has never been content merely to play God with her characters: she would rather be the avenging Yahweh. Her justice is unblinking, her wrath is boundless—most often directed against faithless husbands and their scheming lovers—and her punishments are indecently satisfying. She is a Yahweh with a profound appreciation of irony. Weldon, after all, is the creator of the wronged and lumpish wife in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil who inflicts a fiendishly comic, years-long revenge on her accountant husband and his romance-novelist lover by turning their own conceits against them. Exploiting the husband's financial arrogance and his mistress's fantasy of the invincibility of love, Weldon's heroine siphons off their bank accounts, their fizzy champagne...