Atwood and Voluptuary

I just finished a novel titled “Alias Grace” wherein Margaret Atwood details extensively the inner life of the celebrated Canadian murderess Grace Marks. The novel is rendered in a modern polyphonic style, which means a variety of narrative voices are employed to keep the reader’s (ah, that buffoon, that simpleton, that spastic child, the reader!) attention . It is by turns epistolary, first-person narrative, third-person narrative, and journalistic. Stanzas of 19th century poetry are slipped in amongst contemporary news accounts, presumably to lend resonance and induce the suspension of disbelief. Nothing dresses up a book after all like an impressive quote or two. When these cannot be suitably manufactured by the author, they can always be copied in from elsewhere.

The plot centers on a doctor's examination of Grace Marks. He is attempting to clear her name and to establish himself as an expert in the treatment of amnesiacs. In the process of his examinations the good doctor falls in love with Grace Marks, succumbs to madness, and seduces his laudanum-addict landlady. His mechanical and maniac copulations with the married proprietess drive him further into lunacy, but he doggedly pursues his examinations of the murderess in the parlor of the warden’s house. As she recounts in exhaustive detail (so as to better demonstrate the dazzling researches of the author) the life of a maid in 19th century Toronto, Grace Marks remarks on the doctor's visible deterioration.

Atwood channels Grace Marks in a first person voice marked by thick chains of clauses held together with commas. These rattle noisily along the tracks of one’s brain. One does not regret that Grace's voice is forgettable. One’s eyes grow literally sore as Grace details, for instance, the best method for churning butter. Perhaps there are many readers, a vast untapped reservoir of readers, for whom the trivia of 19th century householding would prove endlessly fascinating. Perhaps in her exhaustive researches Ms. Atwood uncovered this demographic.

As in all Atwood novels women are persistently, vigorously, comprehensively, and opportunistically leered, fondled, pinched, and boffed. The copulations are endless, joyless, and strangely sexless. When one closes the book and places it on the table, one still hears the complaints of the women within the covers, one’s overloaded brain recalls an apocryphal episode wherein a lady, stuffed into a trunk in whose side panel a hole two inches in diameter has been bored with a hand drill, is subjected to the anonymous interpolations of a tribe of coal-dusty, lusty railroad men while she is smuggled across the border to be sold as a slave in some shadowy Canadian market. This lady, folded in the trunk like a white trembling fetus, will later, upon recalling these horrors, take out a small pair of enameled scissors and loose a lock of her hair which will fall to the floor like an autumn leaf and then, seized with a kind of orgasmic urgency she will depilate herself and stand alone in some second-floor parlor, bare and dead like a winter branch.

When a novel isn’t quite working as a narrative I like to focus on the language. And Atwood is certainly a competent, even masterful, craftsperson. There are some wonderful constructions throughout and a broad and deep use of the language. Two words which I particularly enjoyed encountering were “voluptuary” and “vitreous.” When I find an excellent or unusual construction I tell myself to stop and underline it with a pencil for further study but alas, I frequently ignore that still, small, scholarly voice. Then I’ll rack my brain trying to remember what it was I had liked so much. This happened with “voluptuary.” I knew I’d been tickled by some “v” word in Atwood, but could not recall the page nor the general area of the narrative where it had occurred. I believed it might be lost to me, this faceless “v” word, possibly forever. With a sigh, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker and there, in the “Talk of the Town”, within a vignette about a casting call, was a woman described as “voluptuous.” And the word came back to me. Serendipity! This, I decided, was the happy ending, and made it worth reading Atwood after all.