Word: gothic
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Alice in Wonderland is alive and well and living in Margaret Atwood's new novel. She has changed a bit: she operates under the alias Joan Foster, resides in Toronto and writes gothic romances on the sly. But she still has more identities than she knows how to handle, takes pills that make her undergo disconcerting changes of size, and gets into trouble by gazing too long into a looking glass...
...quietly unremarkable wife of a humorless student radical. In odd stolen hours, she plays mistress to an avant-garde artist who serves as a kind of latter-day Mad Hatter. From both husband and lover, Joan cleverly hides two secret shames: the fact that she produces feverishly romantic gothic novels and her pre-diet-pill memories of a miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing while staring at herself in a three...
...same might be said of Margaret Atwood's writing in Lady Oracle. The novel does not develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself - letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...
...problem is that despite its title, the book is much more an English gothic romance than a mystery. Gwenda, a dim young woman orphaned as a toddler and brought up by relatives in New Zealand, arrives back in Britain with her new husband, Giles. No sooner have they bought a nice house in the town of Dillmouth than Gwenda starts getting attacks of déjà vu and is clutched by a nameless dread while descending the stairs. It is soon clear to the reader, and eventually even to dim Gwenda, that she has been here before. Just...
Georgia-born Harry Crews has pushed this proposition about as far as it can go. In such short novels as Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, The Hawk Is Dying and Car (in which a man eats a car), Crews customized gothic cliches into literary hot-rods. A Feast of Snakes is his most outlandish vehicle to date. Set in Mystic, Ga., site of an annual rattlesnake hunt, the book gathers its atmosphere from the frenzies and violence associated with religious primitivism...