One of the vicious little ironies about becoming a successful novelist is that people want you to do anything but write fiction. Forget about the week-long conferences or panel discussions, the visiting professorships or guest lectures – the literary world has a whole arsenal of obligations in store for the Important Novelist of Note.
To get an idea just how many odd jobs such a writer confronts, take a gander at Margaret Atwood’s assorted nonfiction, “Writing With Intent.” Although she isn’t quite as averse to saying no as John Updike, whose prose roundups top 800 pages each, Atwood remains remarkably assignable. Essays, reviews, introductions, eulogies, afterwords – yes, yes, yes. And also unlike Updike, she mixes the carrots with the peas, so to speak.
I originally thought I favored dish segregation until I began reading “Writing With Intent.” By mixing everything together on the plate, Atwood has come up with a tastier meal than her menu suggests. So a review of Updike’s “Witches of Eastwick” sits atop a meditation on pornography, an afterword to “Anne of Green Gables” mixes with a critique of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The General in His Labyrinth.”
As critical work alone, this is sharp writing. Unlike many novelists, Atwood bolts out of the gate quickly with traction-grabbing leads. “In three words or less,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” is “a hair-raiser.” Azar Nafisi’s “engrossing ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ is the sort of book that ruins the sleep of those in charge of placing books in bookstores. Where to shelve it?”
Whereas in reviews she pries open reader’s attention with here-and-now concerns, Atwood’s essays are subtler break-and-enter jobs. One bold piece, “The Spotty Handed Villainess,” takes a detour from its thoughts on female villains to define nothing less than the contours of the novel itself. Ever the professional, Atwood tackles the subject with questions of craft:
“What kind of story shall I choose to tell? Is it, for instance, comic or tragic or melodramatic, or all? How shall I tell it? Who will be at the center of it, and will this person be (a) admirable or (b) not? And – more important than it may sound – will it have a happy ending or not?”
These questions might sound facile, but they explain quite a lot about how novels get made. And they show how deep is Atwood’s debt to genre fiction. She owns up to that and more here with long pieces about Elmore Leonard, historical fiction, fairy tales and Dashiell Hammett. As with everything, Atwood is matter-of-fact about how this last interest began. “When I was a preadolescent spending summers in northern Canada, I read a lot of old detective fiction because it was there.”
As Atwood well knows, we read collections like “Writing With Intent” to find out what the chef has been nibbling on in the kitchen. Not surprisingly then, some of the best writing featured here comes in slice-
of-life memoirs. We learn about Atwood’s childhood reading fetishes, her first encounter with Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” the high points of her first European sojourn. By the end of the trip, she is so “supersaturated” with culture, “if someone had stepped on my head, a stream of dissolved brochures would have poured forth.”
Although she began her career as an academic, did graduate work at Harvard and has published several critical works on Canadian literature, Atwood has a knack at convincing us she’s just one of the plebes. Other writers, like Mary McCarthy, “fence with their considerable intelligence,” as Atwood writes in her introduction to The Paris Review’s “Women Writers at Work.” Atwood, however, would be just as happy with a game of bocce.
This is, of course, a pose, but it’s an effective one because even when the byline is Margaret Atwood, a reader must be seduced and made comfortable. Nowhere is this act trickier for Atwood than when addressing “women’s issues,” about which she is notably coy, undogmatic, but also unbending. When an argument teeters on the verge of rhetoric, she smartly resorts to statistics. “The average jail sentence in the United States for men who kill their wives is four years,” she writes in a piece on “bad” women. “But for women who kill their husbands – no matter what the provocation – it’s twenty.”
In this regard, Atwood resembles her equally prolific genre-straddling British counterpart, A.S. Byatt. Rather than indulge polemic, she susses out the artistic romper room of our unconscious in art – in mythology, children’s tales and ghost stories. If Atwood had a mascot it would be the trickster. “Mother Goose dresses like a feather brain for the same reason that female ‘tourists’ are favored as espionage couriers,” she writes in one intriguing aside. “Both disarm suspicion.”
As this collection makes clear, Margaret Atwood could be said to do the same. But by now we really should know better.
John Freeman is a writer in New York. His reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
…
Writing with Intent
Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005
By Margaret Atwood
Carroll & Graf, 427 pages, $26
