Turning Inward
GOLDSTEIN, ERIC D.
Turning Inward Life Before Man By Margaret At wood Simon & Schuster. 317pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Eric D. Goldstein After moving out on her boyfriend, Lesje Green becomes lethargic in her new...
...brooding, brutish, and lower-class??is a tragicomical foil to the Schoenhofs...
...Nate, in a bad moment later on, feels as if he will "implode...
...Indeed, the dramatic tension lies less in the shifting alignments of partners than in the question of how each character will evolve along a personal continuum...
...Nate, Elizabeth, and Lesje may not be happy people, but there is nothing trendy or gratuitous about their cheer-lessness...
...each moment arrives already tired...
...What Nate, Elizabeth and Lesje happen to be doing at a given moment often serves merely as a backdrop for their meandering thoughts...
...In one marvelous scene, Chris begs Nate to order Elizabeth to leave him...
...Their self-absorption is too compassionately drawn...
...Lesje is not fully fleshed out, while Nate's civilized meekness is just a bit too much...
...Although rewarding on its own, the earlier work can be seen as an exercise in primal screaming that clears the way for the new novel's controlled, open-ended scrutiny of two years in the lives of three complex individuals...
...She seeks refuge from the "fog" of human existence in a daydream where she is alone, watching the dinosaurs roam their prehistoric world...
...Ironically, the one social misfit in the novel is the only character whose actions are harnessed directly to his emotions...
...Reviewed by Eric D. Goldstein After moving out on her boyfriend, Lesje Green becomes lethargic in her new quarters: "The house, with no furniture, nothing radiating back to her from the bare walls, absorbs what little energy she has...
...Lesje and Nate are somewhat less satisfying creations...
...Tugged in so many directions, Nate is immobilized...
...In the various world the author has placed them, happiness is simply as elusive as a distant Golden Age...
...Nate, her partner in a moribund marriage, cannot choose between his wife or his mistress, political idealism or disillusionment, jogging or smoking...
...It never occurs to him "that he too can move, that he is free to get up and walk out at any time...
...Lesje, when she is not out to lunch in prehistory, wonders what is missing from her love affairs...
...Elizabeth Schoenhof is shaken by the suicide of a lover she has recently jilted and feels like a "peeled snail," too self-aware to contend with the present...
...Surfacing and Life Before Man are nourished by the same sensibility...
...The author steps easily into the skins of all her characters, but she is clearly most comfortable with Elizabeth, the novel's most fully realized character...
...His wife ruminates about her ex-lover's suicide and ??although she and Nate have an agreement??analyzes her husband's extramarital maneuvers...
...Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who has produced eight volumes of poetry, Atwood is at her best when describing Elizabeth's moments of intense, if sometimes obscure, feeling...
...When Elizabeth refuses to go with Chris, he is lost...
...Cutting all ties to her confused present, the heroine descends into a hallucinatory, subconscious realm in search of her submerged past...
...Nate worries about how his wife, mistresses and daughters perceive him...
...She feels she's losing weight and that the house is gaining it...
...Unlike her human friends, Lesje's dinosaurs are simple and predictable...
...He cannot give up his career as a craftsman of arty toys, or make a success of it...
...In Atwood's fine earlier novel, Surfacing (Simon and Schuster, 1972), the protagonist does "implode...
...Free of their sophisticated anxieties, Chris leaks no energy: What he feels is what he does...
...With "nothing left over, no reserves he could draw on," Chris kills himself...
...The two other main characters in Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man also leak more energy than they expend usefully, though for different reasons...
...In adversity, Chris explodes...
...Balancing intimacy and distance as her focus moves from one character to another, Atwood portrays all three as profoundly isolated, hedged in by their individual complexities...
...And the three reflect continually on their unhappy childhoods...
...Elizabeth's lover, Chris...
...None of the characters, though, resembles the sort of angst-besotted fool who asks for nothing more than a few bracing slaps across the face...
...If Elizabeth suffers from a painful consciousness, Lesje, a young paleontologist and, eventually, Nate's mistress, suffers from avoiding it...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 11
