Life Without Joy
CLEAVER, CAROLE
Life Without Joy Cat's Eye By Margaret Atwood Doubleday. 446 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Former editor, "Mademoiselle" Canada is a cold country and Cat's Eye, the latest...
...And that profound tiredness permeates this book...
...Now she envisions Cordelia as a bag lady, or prostrate with terminal illness...
...She says of the refreshments, "Eventually there's nothing you can put into your mouth without tasting the death in it...
...Elaine confronts her deteriorating body with dismay, yet also with relief...
...But Atwood's voice is no longer angry...
...To the retrospective of her work, the validation of her life, Elaine wears black...
...She experiences "disappointment," "impatience" and "anxiety...
...She has the kind of mind that would describe a rose garden as an infestation of briars...
...Never a word of joy, of pleasure, of tenderness...
...Cat's Eye is in many respects a throwback to the angry days of feminism, when it was necessary not only to dress like men but to think and sound like them...
...While there she tries to confront a traumatic relationship that she had with Cordelia, a girlhood tormentor and teenage "friend.' In a cruel prank, Cordelia had pressured Elaine into a ravine where she was almost killed, and the incident has profoundly warped Elaine's attitude toward life and the members of her sex...
...Several decades ago middle-aged women had every reason to scream about abuses...
...The only emotions it evokes are weariness and repulsion...
...Today's woman of 50, who has experienced everything, is more likely to be weary...
...Given all this we cannot help wondering: How feminist is a woman who admits she neither " likes or trusts women...
...It will be so much easier to "let herself go...
...It's dirty....' A night of love is described as a wet stain on the sheet...
...When he puts his arms around her, "It'sa gesture less of desire than of fatigue...
...Her paintings denigrate and satirize the housewife's plight...
...Elaine Risley, a celebrated "feminist" painter in her 50s, revisits the Toronto of her childhood where there is to be a retrospective of her work...
...Elaine's former husband is an artist, too, and his paintings remind her of "things [I've seen] by the highway, when something's been run over...
...Locked in their kitchens, deprived of the chance to experience real life, they did not "go gentle into that good night...
...It is merely a dreary one...
...they never empathize or sympathize with female verities...
...Her sexual farewell to her ex-husband conveys neither poignancy nor nostalgia...
...So fearful is Atwood of sounding soft, falling into sentimentality, that she uses a clinical prose devoid of feeling...
...She has a schoolboy's need to repel, to shock...
...No great moments...
...Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Former editor, "Mademoiselle" Canada is a cold country and Cat's Eye, the latest offering of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, is a cold book...
...Her pages team with words like snot, piss, blood, and bum (evidently the Canadian equivalent of ass, which she never uses except as asshole...
...Having acquired more self-confidence, women now claim equality while glorying in their differences...
...There are no heroes in this world...
...Toasted by the women's movement for her six previous sociological/ political novels, Atwood has here written a more personal, introspective work, the closest she may ever come to autobiography...
...One affair that she has is reduced to an "agonized trance,' and another is nothing more than "puppies in the mud...
...Car's Eye is not a sad book...
...No triumphs...
...It is not a crime to be soft, caring, to express emotion...
...Obviously in Cordelia's case Elaine hopes that is true...
...Live long enough and the licker becomes the lickee," says Elaine's exhusband...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 5
