Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
Mystery Women
By Robert Towers
Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood
Doubleday, 446 pp., $18.95
A Theft
by Saul Bellow
Penguin, 109 pp., $6.95 (paper)
The Whiteness of Bones
by Susanna Moore
Doubleday, 277 pp., $17.95
As a novelist, Margaret Atwood never seems out of control. Whatever rage or disappointment may smolder underneath, the surfaces of her fiction are unusually cool and dry. The daughter of an entomologist, she must have absorbed from an early age the high value attached to precision, detachment, and honesty in the investigation of the living and the dissection of the dead. At the same time, she seems to have been powerfully struck by the discrepancy between an allegiance to such virtues and the messiness of ordinary life. Formidably intelligent and observant, she has focused her unblinking scrutiny upon the habits, the attitudes, and especially the self-deceptions of the North American—specifically, Anglo-Canadian—middle class and its bohemian offshoots during the past few decades. She skewers the pretensions of bad art and bad faith when she encounters them. Inevitably, she has participated in the controversies over feminism, though she is not a reflexive feminist. In her most widely read but least typical novel, The Handmaid's Tale (1986), she created a chilling dystopia drawn from the religious revivalism and antifemale backlash that she perceived, or feared, in the United States of the Reagan era.
Review, 3071 words
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