As photographed for The New York Times Sunday magazine, Ms. Dowd wears red shoes as a badge of courage, but she's tormented when she looks around at the terrible aimlessness and arbitrariness of the bodies strewn on the field of sexual warfare. She draws on pithy allusions from movies and poetry, which she shoots like scattershot. But it's the peek into her personal life, from interviews and publicity as well as several choice anecdotes, that suggests she's really writing a postmodern lament of love.
She could have called her book "The Love Song of Maureen Dowd." Like T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, she can't understand how she got to this "tedious argument of insidious intent," which boils down to why, at 53, she's a childless spinster. Instead of asking, "Do I dare?" she asks, "Why didn't I?" Instead of measuring her life in coffee spoons, she pays it out in cold column inches. She counts the most sophisticated men and women of stage, screen and video as her friends, who "come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." But they can't answer exactly what went wrong with her love life, either.
Like so many authors, Ms. Dowd suggests that universal experiences grow from the acorns of her life and from those she has interviewed. But no great oaks here. The scientific research that answers the central question that men will eventually be irrelevant, or at the very least demoted to a nice but not really necessary second sex, is cleverly engaged but runs aground deep into the shallows. She's especially retro quoting Norman Mailer's jape that women have never needed a lot of men to perpetuate the species: " . . . all women needed were about a hundred semen slaves that they could milk every day . . . and they could keep the race going. So they don't need us."
She concludes that she has no conclusions. She has no answers for women (or men, either), only questions. She asks for no sympathy, but in the end remains a middle-aged female Prufrock, who could have written: "I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter."