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Books: Life Studies BLUEBEARD’S EGG AND OTHER STORIES

3 minute read
Patricia Blake

Reading Margaret Atwood’s short stories is like seeing life studies done by an artist famous for large, symbolic canvases. Absent are the extended metaphors that gave form to her earlier novels. The protagonist of An Edible Woman, for example, feels so cannibalized by the people in her life that she serves her fiance a bride made of sponge cake and icing, then flees from the altar. Gone too is Atwood’s allegorizing. In last year’s The Handmaid’s Tale she offered a vision of America transformed into a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy.

Here Atwood is concerned with rapid and telling characterization, especially of men. In Scarlet Ibis, Don and Christine have gone on vacation to Trinidad, where the decomposition of their marriage picks up speed. Don is the kind of fellow on whom a sunburn, “instead of giving him a glow of health, made him seem angry.” He began “drumming his fingers on tabletops again.” < When he made love to his wife, it was “as if he were listening for something else, a phone call, a footfall. He was like a man scratching himself. She was like his hand.”

The heroine of the title story, Sally, is in love with her husband’s stupidity. Every time Ed says or does something foolish, Sally “wants to hug him, and often does; and he is so stupid he can never figure out 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 his arm pressed against Marylynne’s “shimmering upper thigh.” Too late, Sally muses, “Possibly he’s enormously clever.”

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 he is a “spray-painter, the kind that goes around at night and writes things on brick walls, things like CRUNCHY GRANOLA SUCKS and SAVE SOVIET JEWS! WIN BIG PRIZES!” But she is attracted by “the sullenness, the stylistic belligerence, the aggressive pastiness and deliberate potato- sprouting-in-the-cellar lack of health.”

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.

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