Canada’s Sardonic Goddess of Dark, Insightful Stories

As a writer, Margaret Atwood is impossible to categorize. She has written 15 works of fiction, five of nonfiction, 13 poetry collections and five children’s books. Within these genres, her characters and story lines cross all borders, roaming through history into the future, working through diaries and flashbacks, prose poems and traditional narrative. There are a few consistencies: Her main characters are, with few exceptions, women, and her settings are often Canadian.

Yet one always knows when one is reading an Atwood novel, and the reason for that is apparent the moment the writer herself begins to speak. Her voice is unmistakable, even for those who have never heard it. Low, even-cadenced, with a deadpan delivery of that final one-liner, that outrageous observation, it echoes in one pitch or another through all of her writing. Skeptical yet vulnerable, an unflinching, lifted-eyebrow of a voice. The kind of voice an audience leans into.

When Atwood recently appeared at UCLA to mark the publication of her new novel, “The Blind Assassin” (Doubleday), there were plenty of them. Words, that is. In what was billed as a conversation about writing with KCRW-FM’s (89.9) Michael Silverblatt, the 60-year-old Canadian writer read a bit from the book, and then proceeded to skim over a wide variety of topics. On her granny’s inability to knit: “During the war, she was relegated to wash cloths, but even they [didn’t come out] square.” On the mysticism of numbers: “There are 93 chapters in [‘The Blind Assassin’], which is a very good number because if you add 9 and 3, it’s 12, and if you add 1 and 2, it’s 3, and someone out there knows what I’m talking about. . . .” On her early teaching career: “I taught grammar to engineering students in a Quonset hut at 8:30 in the morning. I made them read Kafka. I thought it would come in handy in their later lives.” On Canadian nationalism: “Canada is such a peculiar country that if you say ‘Canada exists,’ people think you mean you hate the United States.”

Even when discussing the role of writer as shaman, she managed to invoke Virgil with the timing and delivery of a great stand-up. By way of PBS.

After that, she answered questions. About character and voice, about the mechanics of writing. Her answers were poetic if a bit vague--about finding the right voice, she said, “It’s the moment when you’re learning to ride a bike that you realize you haven’t fallen off and you’re actually moving forward.”

“Novelists,” she said finally, “write not out of a great fund of wisdom but out of a great fund of ignorance. We’re trying to create order out of chaos. And it’s dark in there.”

After that, Atwood was, as they say, available for signing. Which can take some time when you’ve written enough to occupy an entire bookcase. People, she said the following morning at her hotel, tend to present her with their entire Atwood libraries.

How long did it go on?

“Never you mind,” she said. “I’m still upright. One dear sweet man,” she added, “had got a hold of an edition of one of my books for which I had done some watercolors. He wanted me to sign every one.”

And did she?

“Of course. Not one of my characters would have done such a thing. But I’m much nicer than any of my characters.”

This is a point she makes several times, in several ways. Not that her main characters are evil, or even mean, but they are often--and often understandably--self-centered, a bit impatient, perhaps, with others as they quest for their personal truths.

Atwood certainly seems a patient person, sympathetic with the relentless questions of young writers demanding she explain her methods, as if she were a magician concealing a set of directions.

“What people want is to know how to do it,” she said. “We want a magic pill, or someone to tell us there is no magic pill. What we don’t want is for one to exist that we can’t get a hold of. So it’s actually a relief to find out that that’s not how it works. People come up later and say, ‘Thank you for saying it’s confusing and dark because that’s how I feel.’ ”

‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Made Her Popular

Atwood came to the attention of the American masses in 1990, when her remarkable novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” was made into a rather disappointing film of the same name. Over the years, her fiction has been dubbed feminist, gothic, popular, literary, historic, domestic and political. All of these things are accurate, but none of them alone is true.

The themes of her work are those of all art: love, death, family, fear, work and power. In Atwood’s hands they are illuminated and clarified by things as mundane as a foray into a lover’s bathroom cabinet, or as extraordinary as the United States run by religious fundamentalists. In either case, in every case, she attempts to tell the truth of her characters’ lives, even if the truth is the revelation of their lies.

The main character of “The Blind Assassin” is a fine example of the less-than-nice Atwood heroine. Elderly and plagued with ailments physical and emotional, Iris Griffen is at once dismissive of the world that now surrounds her, including those who come to her aid, and yet conscious of this, and other, failings.

Much has been made of the novel’s ambitious construct--a story within a novel within a novel--and how it is used to piece together the life of sometimes-narrator Iris as she copes with the small humiliations and enormous surrender of old age. As Iris’ life ebbs, deceptions and truths are revealed and in the end the story is not at all what one thought it was.

“Some people,” she says, “have been taken aback by the pulp inserts in the novel. I had a darling young man--I’m now at that point in my life when anyone under 50 is darling--say to me, “You know, Ms. Atwood, I was surprised that a person such as yourself would take an interest in writing such as that.’ I said, ‘I was not always a person such as myself.’ ”

Vividly Captures Canada in the 1930s and 1940s

It is an ambitious work, in scope and complexity, with detail paid to every aspect of every thread. Critics have expressed admiration for her ability to so vividly capture Canada in the ‘30s and ‘40s, though writing in the New Yorker, John Updike took issue with several things, including the language and influence of the novel within the novel.

Has she read the review?

“I never read reviews until much later,” she said, “but from what my agent tells me what he really wants is for my books to end more happily and for men to not be viewed as such monsters. What are we talking about? He’s written some of the most monstrous men in history and they say the most scabrous things about women compared to which the slight petulance of my leading man is nothing.”

She is laughing a bit when she says this, but not when she addresses his charge that the nature of the book within the book was too racy to have gotten published in the 1940s.

“Dear Mr. Updike, four letter words did appear in literary fiction in the early ‘40s,” she said with the authority of one who knows from footnotes. “Would I be so careless? No.”

For one who had not read the review she was remarkably familiar with it, and although her voice changed very little, a sort of impatience was clear. An impatience sparked and fed by years of telling women’s stories in a still-very-male literary world.

Women’s Work Often Marginalized

Indeed, her introduction at the UCLA appearance as “one of the greatest living women writers,” was a qualification one would never make when introducing a male writer. It is a theme she has dealt with time and again--how women’s work is so often marginalized. It’s changed a bit, she said, but for a woman writer, “it always did help to be dead. And I must say it does help to be old.”

How?

“Men in their peak reproductive years tend to focus on certain other characteristics. . . ,” she said, with that deadpan delivery. “If one can now, as one can, present a kindly benevolent older facade, as in” she said, suddenly feigning an elderly lasciviousness, “ ‘Come into my gingerbread cottage, num, num, num,’ no,” she returned, laughing, to her normal mien, “I mean, of course, take a benevolent interest in their young lives, then one is not as threatening and perhaps one’s books will be read simply as books.

“Somebody did say to [Canadian writer] Alice Munro,” she continued, “early in her career, ‘Well, you might be a great writer, but I wouldn’t want to go to bed with you,’ and you are just thunderstruck. I mean, who asked? And George Eliot, everyone kept saying she looked like a spaniel, but then when she got older, they decided she was wise, it was a wise look. That’s what I’m doing, trying to cultivate a wise look.”

There is a wisdom in her face, but much mischief as well; she can deconstruct Melville with the best of them, but she also makes collages from advertisements in Marie Clair. Her sensibility is the result of a very Canadian youth--her father was an entomologist who habitually took his family on extended trips into the bush country--and voracious indiscriminate reading. Comic books and Chaucer, bodice-rippers and Faulkner.

“Once I was at NYU teaching a class in,” pause, “Southern Ontario Gothic, and one of the students asked, ‘Is everyone in Canada mentally deranged?’ I said, ‘Look out the window--here you don’t know any of them by name. In a small town, you’re related to them.’ ”

She lives now in Toronto, hardly a small town, with novelist Graeme Gibson, whom she refers to as “my life’s partner.” They have a 24-year-old daughter, Jess, about which Atwood will reveal little save that she is not at all impressed at being the daughter of the woman the Ottawa Citizen newspaper recently called “the mother goddess of Canadian fiction.”

“She doesn’t let me get away with a thing. She’ll say, ‘Oh, I think we’re feeling a little famous today? Maybe we need a nice nap,’ ” Atwood explained, conjuring the image of a daughter with a voice as strong and specific as her own.

Still it must be difficult to find the humility necessary to wonderful writing when one is a mother goddess. How does she find that balance?

“I shall tell you,” she said, and from her bag she produced a paperback copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” “There you go, a dose of that, pick you right up. Basically, what it says is don’t worry about it, we’ll all be dead very soon. Just do what is appropriate for you to do and don’t worry about the rest.”

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.