It was a relief to pick up The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood and find myself sinking into it with pleasure. In fact, in the very first chapter I came across the source of an enduring image for me: one of the main characters has to grade some papers, and she does it at a drafting table in the early morning, casually, dropping each paper to the floor as she finished. Grading student papers is always stressful for me, and this image of a woman who can just grade, without agonizing, has stayed with me for more than ten years.
This novel is about three women friends who each, at different times, lose a man to the same other woman; one of the three gets her man back, when the other woman pitches him out. The novel begins with the unexpected return of the other woman from the dead, and then tells, in three lengthy flashbacks, the stories of each friend's childhood and prior relationship with the other woman.
Unfortunately, by about halfway through the book I had started to remember why I stopped reading contemporary literary fiction. All three main characters seem to sleep-walk through their lives; they don't understand what happens to them as children (all awful), and as adults they drift into their relationships. There's a detachment in a lot of contemporary fiction that leaves me feeling sort of blank-eyed and drugged, and that also feels untrue to my experience.
In addition, each of the three women loves her man more than he loves her (if he loves her at all), and each man is easily pulled away by the seductress. The message is that women's relationships with men only last until a sexier woman comes along, and that they are essentially powerless in their relationships. Men, on the other hand, are contemptuous and careless of the women who are foolish enough to love them, but easy prey for a sexpot who knows how to lead them around by their gonads.
Someone ought to be offended by these portrayals; it's possible that everyone should be. I remember when David and I went to see the execrable Heartbreakers. We walked out early on, but not before seeing enough of the film that I ranted to David in the parking lot that men ought to be out picketing it. Every man in the movie was a complete sucker for the most obvious and weak seduction ploys. I don't generally get too worked up about movies anymore; I figure the latest offensive portrayal of a gay man will come and go from the multiplex in the blink of an eye, and it's not worth getting an ulcer over it. But, really, heterosexual men ought to stand up in response to movies like that, a books like The Robber Bride, and say, "Wait a minute: we can make a commitment, we are capable of love, and our brains are more powerful than our dicks."
That is, assuming it's true.
The Robber Bride is a tosser, based on Criterion Number 4, "Would I buy this book today, or would I just read it from the library?" On the other hand, it's a pretty good book and I already own it, and it feels just barely conceivable to me that I might read it again someday (perhaps for a critical study of sex roles in Atwood's work?). On the principle that if I'm not absolutely sure I want to get rid of it, I should hang onto it for awhile longer, it's a keeper, and will go back on the shelf--for now.
Posted by Su Penn at June 18, 2003 07:48 AM | TrackBackIt's been a long time since I read this, and I don't disagree with the negative portrayals of men, but I remember loving this book, loving the language, loving the world that Atwood constructed. The enduring image for me has to do with the history professor who has a scale-model of some battle from (French?) history in her basement, with various spices as placeholders. And I do think we drift into many of our most important relationships; perhaps we don't stay in them without thought, but they often begin that way. Meaning emerges in hindsight, I find.
Posted by: Julie at July 1, 2003 01:44 PMI loved the spice battles, too--especially the way she would start eating the cloves when she got thinking too hard.
Talking about the characterizations, though, reminds me of something else I was going to say about this book: there's a character in this book (the professor) who is unusually small and who can turn language around so that she thinks, writes, and talks backwards, and Atwood exploits that to find reversals of words and phrases that add meaning: something ominous in an otherwise cheerful phrase, for instance. I thought that was clever.
But I thought it was clever when Barbara Kingsolver did it in The Poisonwood Bible, too. The similarities between Kingsolver's Ada and Atwood's Tony are marked: they're both physically different, very smart, sexually shy, and inclined to do things backwards. Ada's a twin, and Tony wonders whether she had a twin who was reabsorbed in her mother's womb.
When I read Poisonwood last year, the character of Ada was one of my favorites. But there is Tony, showing the same constellation of characteristics that made Ada unique. It makes me wonder if there's some common source for the two of them, if both Kingsolver and Atwood were drawing on some real person who had recently made the press or something.
Posted by: Su Penn at July 2, 2003 08:54 AMThis book is one of the best i have read, the only part that disturbed me was that all three of the weomen had disturbing chilhoods, then were manipulated back into misery as adults. I would really like to learn the answer to the question "who killed Zeina"
Posted by: Stacie at November 5, 2003 12:55 PM