The Great Switcheroo by Roald Dahl read deals by Patricia Neal Vinyl Record Album LP Caedmon Records

The Great Switcheroo is deals a short story by Roald Dahl and read by his wife Patricia Neal on this classic Caedmon release. From the back cover: Roald Dahl's short stories – at least those that first made his name known — are as singular and as distinctive as a thumb print. They combine the logical and the macabre, the grotesque and the grisly, the outlandish and the ordinary in a mixture of their own

Some of the stories, domestic in nature, serve as battlegrounds in the war between the sexes, a war in which one of the combatants who has been getting the worst of it, manages to balance the scales. There is a kind of cosmic justice in Dahl's work that appeals to the better part of our instincts.

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The Great Switcheroo by Roald Dahl read by Patricia Neal

Vinyl: VG+ with some sleeve and handling marks
Cover: VG+ some storage and corner wear, small split on bottom edge

Side A: 36:39
Side B: 36:08
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In “William and Mary,” for example, the long-suffering wife becomes the custodian of the still sentient brain (the body had long been dispatched) of her erstwhile spouse. It is a work grim and funny at the same time. In “The Way to Heaven,” the husband, a man of mean spirit and sadistic behavior, is lethally hoist on his own petard. Every reader, especially if possesses a psychological tic of his own, will finish that story with the most exalted sense of pleasure.

Mr. Dahl doesn't take sides however. In “Neck,” it is the husband who is the worm that turns, as it is in “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat,” a deftly told tale on which a man about town can dine out for a long cold winter.

Mr. Dahl's high flying and wayward imagination expresses itself in the most detailed and precise forms. His stories are saturated with recondite knowledge of all sorts (bee culture, the geography of French vineyards, the art of poaching). And his stories are models in the way the most outlandish and even scarifying happenings combine with the coolest and most logical of tones. The events may be beyond belief, but the voice could not be more reasonable.

There is however another side to this Welsh born author that places him more centrally in the tradition of Kipling and Somerset Maugham, superb craftsmen and effortless spinners of tales. At his best, Dahl, like them, leaves the reader with that sense of completeness that he feels only when he has encountered a perfectly shaped and fashioned work. True, the heart of many of his stories is only an anecdote, but the anecdote is so fleshed out, so neatly controlled and managed that the story has a fullness and weight it would not have in the hands of a less skillful writer.

“The Great Switcheroo” is surely one of these. It may seem no more than a long party joke. But think of the way the author has played out the details, balancing the suspense in such a manner that the reader can hardly wait to turn the page. The development and analysis of character is not one of Dahl's strengths. In his work, the emphasis is on what happens rather than whom it happened to. And in "The Great Switcheroo” it is precisely what is happening that rivets our attention.

Nevertheless it is unfair and too easy to dismiss Dahl as only a clever man with a pen. A commentator on his writing remarked once that Dahl writes children's books for adults - an ambiguous judgment that one doesn't quite know how to take. But just as classic children's stories reveal psychological and mythic patterns, so do his “children's stories for adults." Their off-beat humor and comic interludes often disguise some of the unhappy truths contained in them. “Georgy Porgy” is about a man who cannot deal with women on equal terms because he thinks they want to swallow him up; finally he believes that one has swallowed him up and that he is living in the cavity of his predator. The humor is broad, but the implications are sinister. The story suggests the passage in Kafka's Metamorphosis when after the has been turned into a bug, Gregor Samsa sees the sole of the boot of his father bearing down to crush out his life.

In another story "Soldier," one of the most moving that he has written, a shell shocked soldier is compelled to live with an unsympathetic and callous wife. The misery of his wartime condition has just begun to dawn on his reader when he is faced with the soldier's greater burden: the woman who is his helpmeet.

Let us remember then, as we enjoy the fun in “The Great Switcheroo,” that there is more than one switch in the story. When the narrator's wife admits that at long last he has proved himself the ideal bedmate – an estimate he may never be able to live up to – what started out as a clubhouse joke suddenly turns into an ironic display of marital maladjustment. Will the husband be able to make the most important switch of all? - Thomas Lask

Thomas Lask is a member of the New York Times cultural staff highly respected for his reviews which have appeared in both the daily and Sunday Book Review sections. In addition, he is the editor of The New York Times Book of Verse, and has taught at the City University.

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