Word: atwoods
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First on Barnaby's list is captain Ed Atwood, who played at number four last year and is undefeated in two seasons. Atwood is what Barnaby calls a "sound player." "He never makes a mistake," Barnaby said. "Ed plays a controlled game...
...Novelist Atwood's quietly awful vision is summed up in a throwaway line. "Hunger is more basic than love," she murmurs in a bizarre aside. "Florence Nightingale was a cannibal." Amid the situation-comedy ordinariness of her life, Marian, the title character of The Edible Woman, suddenly finds herself in a very unfunny predicament. People are trying to eat her up. Her employers feed upon her energy, her fiance feeds upon her sexuality...
Quietly Awful. But reader, beware. Behind this quiet, well-taught Garden Party-girl behavior, Atwood conceals the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail. She is one of the new sisterhood-like Novelist Joan Didion and Poet Anne Sexton-who seem to have sprung full-grown from condemned-property dollhouses. Hyper-observant, dangerously polite waifs, they look at the world with large, bruised eyes and gently whisper of loneliness, emptiness and casual cruelty...
Glacier's Edge. Nothing so simple will make life appear normal to her author. In her fourth published volume of poems, Procedures for Underground, Atwood compresses to an even more tactile intensity the panic that beats through her novel. Others may see evolution as a reasonably deserved survival of the fittest. Her gift, and her curse, is to see the universe as one living creature that survives only by devouring parts of itself. Even the cord of an electric typewriter can seem organic-a "hungry plug drinking a sinister transfusion...
Primeval isolation, a selfhood that is a mystery most of all to oneself, an animal sense of mortality-these are the terrors Miss Atwood has to offer. Technology, social sophistication, are transparent pretenses behind which man is naked, with drooling fang and club at the ready. Dealing in the artifices of well-made verse and well-made novel, she convincingly suggests that the overcivilized and the barbarous are one. Yet the Atwood message is beyond formulated pessimism; it has the rhythmic cycling of hope and despair natural to life itself. A lyricism as honest as a blade of grass...