Fearful, if it weren’t so funny

WHAT are we to make of this bite-size book crafted by the prolific novelist, essayist, poet, myth-maker and demythologizer Margaret Atwood? “The Tent” is clearly not a novel or a poem or a memoir, and although composed of 35 short, cleverly named pieces, it’s not really an essay or story collection. To dip into its pages is like dipping into a box of assorted candies: some crunchy, some chewy, some soft, some brittle. But unlike candy, these confections are seldom sweet. More often, they’re tart, pungent, spicy, occasionally bittersweet, tasting of strong herbs or laced with spirits that deliver a heady punch.

Illustrated with line drawings by Atwood herself, the components of this “tent” could be characterized as the verbal equivalent of cartoons for grown-ups or satires -- jokes that are funny but deadly serious, arising out of situations so dire they can only be portrayed as jokes.

“I have decided to encourage the young,” is how Atwood begins one delectably astringent piece. “Once I wouldn’t have done this, but now I have nothing to lose. The young are not my rivals. Fish are not the rivals of stones.... I’ll encourage them indiscriminately, whether they deserve it or not. Anyway, I can’t tell them apart.

“So I will stand cheering generally, like a blind person at a football game; noise is what is required, waves of it, invigorating yelps to inspire them to greater efforts, and who cares on what side and to what ends?”

Atwood strikes an almost tender note in “Bring Back Mom: An Invocation,” which takes the form of a poem commemorating the woman

who made our school lunches --

the tuna sandwich, the apple,

the oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper --

with the rubber band she’d saved in a jar;

who was always home when we got there

doing the ironing

or something equally boring

who smiled the weak smile of a trapped drudge

as we slid in past her,

heading for the phone,

filled with surliness and contempt

and the resolve never to be like her.

For a hilarious, marvelously acerbic parody both of contemporary thrillers and writerly self-importance, readers should treat themselves to “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon”:

“I heard it as if in a dream. ‘Beetleplunge.’ I often get such insights, such gifts from the Unknown.... That word -- if it is a word -- might look quite stunning on the jacket of a book.”

But however hilarious she can be, the hilarity comes from Atwood’s sense of genuine desperation. Sometimes, it’s the personal angst of an individual writer confronting the inevitable limitations of age and mortality. More often, it’s a far more general fear and anxiety about the fate of the world, as in “Chicken Little Goes Too Far,” a well-nigh perfect parable about the perils menacing our planet.

“You’re in a tent,” begins the piece that gives this collection its title. It’s a thin tent, we’re told, set in a vast, howling wilderness of desolation, violence and ruin. Inside, “you,” who is also Atwood herself, is writing away, as if her life depended on it, and not only hers, but everyone’s:

“The trouble is, your tent is made of paper. Paper won’t keep anything out. You know you must write ... on the paper walls, on the inside of your tent.... Some of the writing has to describe the howling that’s going on outside ... but this is difficult to do because you can’t see through the paper walls ... and you don’t want to go out there.... Some of the writing has to be about your loved ones and the need you feel to protect them, and this is difficult ... because not all of them can hear the howling in the same way you do, some of them think it sounds like a picnic out there ... like a hot beach party.”

Atwood’s biting wit is the candle she uses to illuminate this dark landscape. And these succinct, acridly funny pieces are, perhaps, her version of T.S. Eliot’s “fragments ... shored against my ruins.” The pieces in “The Tent” are often -- no insult to their author intended -- “witchy,” in the sense they exude the grimly amusing wisdom of a woman who’s seen a lot over the course of a good many years.

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Merle Rubin is a regular contributor to Book Review.