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Businessmen as Lovers
by
Rosemary Tonks
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Businessmen as Lovers |
| Author: | Rosemary Tonks |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1969 |
| Length: | 138 pages |
| Availability: | Businessmen as Lovers - US |
| Businessmen as Lovers - UK | |
| Businessmen as Lovers - Canada | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- The original US edition of the novel was published as Love Among the Operators (1970); the re-issue takes the original UK title
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Our Assessment:
B : fine, lightly comic holiday account
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Listener | . | 11/9/1969 | Edwin Morgan |
| London Rev. of Books | . | 26/12/2024 | Ruby Hamilton |
| The NY Times Book Rev. | . | 22/2/1970 | Martin Levin |
| Sunday Times | . | 21/9/1969 | John Whitley |
From the Reviews:
- "The comedy is rattled through, commented on, and to some extent engineered, by Mimi and Caroline, the two young women whose mad and saucy private colloquies convey the essential Tonks flavour. There are some very nice touches (.....) It is a light but certainly undrowsy book." - Edwin Morgan, The Listener
- "Tonks’s least successful novel and one that calls to mind a phrase from The Bloater, ‘rank silliness’ (.....) It’s Tonks’s only novel not set in England, but it betrays the worst excesses of English satire: shallow apoliticism, vague exoticism, a madcap plot that nevertheless leaves the social order totally undisturbed. (...) The story’s ludic machinations are tedious to recall (.....) The book isn’t without Tonks’s usual epigrammatic flourishes (...), maledictions (...) and mad imagery (...), but she should be judged by the quality of her contempt -- her maniacal precision -- and the strokes here are too broad to justify such preening." - Ruby Hamilton, London Review of Books
- "Here is a delicious sliver of whimsy hovering somewhere between A.A.Milne and Mack Sennett, if you can imagine such a phenomenon. (...) An exotic delight." - Martin Levin, The New York Times Book Review
- "Miss Tonks can describe the most complicated and ludicrous action in simple terms and she has an understanding love of her victims which comes out in a warmth like a Mediterranean sun." - John Whitley, Sunday Times
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
By the time Businessmen as Lovers opens, narrator Mimi and her second cousin Caroline are already on the continent, having reached Paris by rail, on their way to holiday in seaside Livone in Italy (where: "The water, much less wet than around the English coast, hardly moves").
They are joined there by Mimi's journalist-beau, Beetle ("He works for Reuters, or Reuters works for him"), and Caroline's husband, Killi -- a businessman who is: "over-revved all the time from making money and counting it" -- and interact with others from and around the local English colony, including archaeologist Sir Rupert Monk-house; Madeleine Voos -- called La Prostitutess, who: "must have come to marry Rupert again" --; Abu'l Akbar Chamoun, called the Persian; and Dr. Oskar Purzelbaum, "funny and also very frightening" who, among much else, runs the local thermal spas (and, promisingly: "is always telling you how to behave, making dramas out of nothing and then cashing in on them").
Businessmen as Lovers is a holiday-abroad story, bookended by arrival and departure.
Despite the exotic foreigners also found in Livone, the main characters are English, and (their) Englishness colors much of the story and action (down to a travelling torch (flashlight) in the novel's final scene: "It's an English one, and you have to doctor it all the time") -- not least in Purzelbaum's diagnosis:
He said Englishmen had great difficulty forming proper emotional relationships, that is why Britain was leading the world in fashion, in intellectual life, and as a welfare state. Apparently we use all these things to cover up our inability to form relationships.A number of relationships figure prominently, with Mimi and Beetle's one that is still coälescing -- "Our feeling for one another keeps changing" -- but is, on the whole, a very satisfied one. Mimi does wonder: "What happens if Beetle, who seems so normal now, turns into another Killi ?" -- but she doesn't really have to worry. But businessman Killi and his relationship with his wife are much more interesting -- with Mimi observing that: "Caroline understands him very well and the kind of man-woman game they play seems to suit them" (despite the fact that: "He's so used to scoring off business opponents, he can't resist scoring off his wife"). So business-focused that his: "metabolism is psychosomatically linked to his business interests", among the most amusing bits of the story is Killi's efforts to meet the Rolls-driving Persian.
Prostitutess forcefully suggests to Caroline:
' You must have an affair ! Straight away ! He is using you as a therapy, he has forgotten you are a woman.' Shrieks !Caroline does have issues with Killi -- complaining also that: "if I discuss anything whatsoever with Killi, he automatically assumes he is right, purely on account of his success in business" -- and the relationship is tested some, but it ultimately doesn't amount to much more than a bit of a holiday-disruption to everyday life.
Among the few vaguely dramatic things that happen in the novel is several of the men deciding that Purzelbaum needs to be taught a lesson, coming up with a plan that Mimi approves of as: "a genuine effort to right a social wrong" (though it seems rather cruel and petty -- and seems to intrigue Purzelbaum more than it really bothers him).
While Killi (and the Persian) fully embody the businessmen-type, Tonks suggests that they only manifest what has become near-universal, with Caroline noting how: "We're all dumb, grey, brutal economists".
Description and exchanges in Businessmen as Lovers tend to the quick and clipped; one back and forth includes the observation that: "This conversation isn't about anything", but then that's also part of the English way here, of how the characters, especially in their relationships, communicate. A lot is bubbling underneath, but Tonks leaves much of it beneath the smooth, lightly frothed surface. So also Mimi describes the Livone beach:
Nothing is too hot. No one talks about the weather. No one reads a book. What for -- when everyone here already has a past (even at twenty), and far too many thoughts to think ?Mimi is also dealing with the grief of her mother's passing -- introduced by Tonks, but not something she or Mimi harp on; typically, early on, Mimi and Caroline are simply: "talking around my great grief with curative sentences". With too many thoughts to think, much is left not addressed directly.
Businessmen as Lovers is a nicely sketched-out holiday-account, a bit crowded and busy, but with a nice holiday-mood kind of unconcern even as Mimi is dealing with serious questions of what lies ahead for her. Tonks' writing has an appealing comic touch as well, distinctly English but also very much her own.
It makes for an amusing little work -- though it remains, perhaps, just a bit too little.
- M.A.Orthofer, 12 November 2025
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Businessmen as Lovers:
- Vintage Classics publicity page
- New Directions publicity page
- See Index of Contemporary British fiction
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English author Rosemary Tonks lived 1928 to 2014.
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© 2025 the complete review
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