Atwood catches out haters with a wink.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Many years ago, I almost met Margaret Atwood at a gala-thing to which I was obliged to wear a tie. She was at a nearby table and someone, some eager publicist or agent, offered to introduce me. To a young writer, this seemed like an opportunity – an opportunity for what, I wasn't sure, yet not one to turn down regardless. But then this intermediary had second thoughts: "Better not. She can be prickly about these things."
In 2012, on stage at the Vancouver Writers' Festival, I would at last be granted that meeting. Margaret Atwood was not prickly at all. Or, if she was, she was prickly in an entertaining way: caustic, wry, quick-witted to the point of impatience, maybe a little didactic, very small. She was also friendly and generous. Of the 500-odd attendees, roughly 490 had come to bask in Ms. Atwood's oracular glow, eight-or-so others were fans of the tech/SF/YA writer Cory Doctorow, and my friends Graeme and Kelly claimed to be there for me. CanLit's Grande Dame des Lettres shared the stage amenably. Afterward, she even bought my book.
There was something almost ceremonial about this, perhaps a common impression to any neophyte's approval by celebrity. After all, Alice Munro might have won the Nobel Prize, but there is no question that our biggest literary star is Margaret Atwood. In Mark Jarman's story, Love Is All Around Us, she appears as a flight attendant, a Hare Krishna, a hockey ref and, maybe most perversely, as the author of The Stone Angel; the story ends with snow and a sardonic paean: "Peggy… Without you we are lost." My generation and its affiliates (X, Y, Pepsi, etc.) grew up with a new Atwood paperback dutifully added to our parents' bookshelves every year, while The Handmaid's Tale introduced us to a notional sort of feminism, at least as explained by some harrowed Grade 10 English teacher who likely feared himself and his goatee the targets of its satire. For as long as I can remember, like CityTV, Margaret Atwood has been everywhere.
For anyone still counting, Stone Mattress is Atwood's 55th book, and her ninth of short fiction. Let's dispense with another formality: Is it good? Yes, of course it's good. In case you haven't been paying attention for the past 45 years, Margaret Atwood is a very good writer. The ubiquity she enjoys, and of which most authors in this country are, frankly, envious, is not by self-promotion alone (though she's good at that too). And I'd suggest that she's at her best writing short fiction – Dancing Girls and Wilderness Tips being my favourite of her books – as the form's necessary restraint tempers a tendency, more evident in the novels, toward pedantry.
Stone Mattress, clarifies a postscript, is not a collection of stories, but "tales," which "removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale and the long-ago teller of tales." Whether timelessness is simply a matter of taxonomy is up for debate, but whatever you call its contents, the writing throughout the book is terrific. Here's an old poet, in the second of a trilogy of linked pieces that open the book, perving out on a grad student:
"She's wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina's. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift… the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known."
So much is happening in this short passage: it elegantly flips a cliché of male desire before closing with a zinger of a joke, albeit one tinged with melancholy as per that wistful "used to be." These sorts of gems are strewn, seemingly effortlessly, throughout the collection, whether its characters are lamenting TV's portrayal of "the olden days" ("the colours are wrong – too clean, too pastel") or plotting the seduction and murder, more than five decades later, of a high school assailant: "It's paltry. It's vicious. It's normal. It's what happens in life."
If Stone Mattress's persistent boomer nostalgia might begin to seem a bit much, one of Atwood's great gifts is to anticipate potential criticisms and undermine them, and the collection's final story catches out haters with an ironic wink. Torching the Dusties, a J.G. Ballard-ian take on Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain, features the seniors' homes of the world laid siege by youthful protestors in baby masks. ("They say we've had our turn, those our age; they say we messed it up," explains one resident; "They have a point there," replies another.)
The stories (tales, fine) here are not all winners, with two commissioned pieces – the teenwolf confessional Lusus Naturae, which reads like an entry in Monologues for Beginners, and a listless revival of the cast from The Robber Bride – limping considerably behind the rest. Yet for the most part Atwood's narrative control, her ability to surprise and her sparkling language are on full display. If it's completely ludicrous to include the word "underrated" in a review of a Margaret Atwood book, then I'd at least suggest her short fiction is comparatively underappreciated: it's less cluttered by grandiosity than the recent novels, which are so broad in scope and theme that it's hard, amid all the bio-terrorism and soap-eating, to trace their genesis to a human being. Stories, by nature of their inherent focus, are often more autobiographically transparent, so Stone Mattress not only showcases its author's talents at their most refined, it also affords a glimpse behind the curtain to the woman working the megaphone.
Sure, we've heeded R. Barthes's and M. Proust's calls not to treat fiction as a breadcrumb trail to the soul of the writer. But the fact is that Margaret Atwood's public persona is so pervasive, and so fundamental to her work, that we no longer "read a Margaret Atwood book" so much as we "read Margaret Atwood." She has become, in ways both self-intended and thrust upon her, a pundit, a brand, an iconoclast – and now an icon. That status not only risks rendering her writing secondary to her own cultural phenomenon, it places the reviewer (hi!) in a double-bind: write something positive, you risk coming across as a grovelling sycophant; write something negative, and it'll be dismissed as jealousy and sour grapes.
What I'm getting at, and trying to forgive myself for, is what really interests me about this new book: the septuagenarian, beyond the persona, who wrote it. The characters here are largely, by their own description, of the "geezer generation," the elderly and sometimes infirm, those seeking a place in this youthy world as it ignores or dismisses or even assaults them. While Atwood has remained, to both admiration and resentment, a staunchly central figure in not just literary but popular and academic circles since the 1970s (escaping only the otherwise robust purview of Toronto's Ford Bros.), the old folks of Stone Mattress seem less sure-footed as they teeter toward the other side.
In The Dead Hand Loves You, Jack observes his failing body in the mirror and opines, "You used to be so young," while the narrator of the Torching the Dusties demands, "What is old age but one long string of indignities?" There is always something of the eternal to a certain type of celebrity, something so essential to the moment that it seems to transcend mortality. In the stories, or tales, or, I think, revelations of Stone Mattress, there is a surprising excess of fallibility and doubt; these are less the grand narratives of Odysseus or Scheherazade than something a lot more personal – often painfully so.
Recently Margaret Atwood was the first writer to sign on to the Future Library, which will bank stories for 100 years for publication in 2114. (A concurrently planted forest will provide the paper.) There must be something thrilling in the knowledge that one's work will remain after one is gone. I'd imagine that legacy is something an author, even a famous one, only begins to consider later in her career, alongside the same preoccupations that befall the rest of us mortals. But if these vibrant stories are any indication, Peggy has a long way to go before she leaves us for lost. And most of all, as one aging writer remarks in Stone Mattress: "Fun is not knowing how it will end."
Pasha Malla is the author of four books.