Word: atwoods
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Critics charge that this complaining has become complaisant, excessively feminist, predictable. Bluebeard's Egg, the most recent collection of fiction by the Canadian, Margaret Atwood, may be a case in point...
Best known for The Handmaid's Tale--her best-selling "visionary" novel in the style of 1984 and Brave New World--Atwood always writes about women struggling against or attempting to survive the oppression of men. The titles of her novels, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, bear this...
...what for." She confides Ed's gaffes to her best friend Marylynne, who giggles with her. Sally improves her mind by taking up gourmet cooking, medieval history and anthropology. Ed is unimpressed; he prefers meat loaf to sweetbreads with pine nuts, and working in the yard to scholarly pastimes. Atwood builds the case for Ed's "endearing thickness" so cannily that it almost seems true. But, as it turns out, Sally is really the dumb one: Ed's seeming obtuseness is only his shield against her disdain. Sally glimpses that truth when she catches her husband at a party with...
...Atwood's writing is formidably disciplined; she keeps her characters at a distance. The finest piece in this collection, The Sunrise, suggests some of the author's strategies. Yvonne, an artist, follows men whose aspects interest her. She tracks them down in the street and induces them to pose for portraits in her studio. She never chooses subjects with "capped-looking teeth," who display themselves as if their faces were "pictures already, finished, varnished, impermeable." Instead, she prefers odd-looking men, like a punk artist with an orange Mohawk, one of her most inspired characterizations. Yvonne suspects that...
Like the artist in her story, Atwood sketches the "imperfect flesh" of those who "show signs of the forces acting upon them, who have been chipped a little, rained on, frayed, like shells on the beach." Not beautiful people, these characters, but in the author's quick hands they are something far more intriguing and valuable: they are alive...