Library Limelights 308

 

Margaret Atwood. Old Babes in the Woods. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2023.

A collection of short stories, an ideal genre to savour during the waits for other books. Atwood's topics range wildly from the prosaic (domestic) to the outright absurd (reincarnated snail). And she can't resist poking a few sci-fi or dystopian sparks into life. Tig and Nell are a domestic couple, providing fore and aft anchors, so to speak, for the book. I mourned with her for Smudgie the cat, for the last Roman Alexandrian, Hypatia. I laughed over Smudgie's tributes, at John the outrageous misanthropist, at George Orwell's crisp replies to a fan.

The pages reflect friendships, gender issues, aging, loss. Is it odd that post-war (WW II) trauma takes so much space? Nell finds that Tig's father, the gruff Old Brigadier General, had a hidden creative bent. Then there's the Freeforall where humans infected by a deadly virus are segregated (live, laugh, love, for tomorrow we die); the few unaffected are prized for breeding purposes. The widow's death-cleaning experience elicits universal gut recognition. What can one possibly say about our global icon that hasn't been said? ... It's pure Atwood.

A few morsels from the mad mixture, unapologetically out of context:

▪ What kind of brain-dead North American twat was I? said John. (22)

▪ Today he'd be called a misogynist as a matter of course, but it seemed to me that his rages against women―cheaters, prudes, witches, wantons—were a subset of his general misanthropy. Mankind, including womankind, was a wreck. (25)

▪ I already regretted the pink angora sweater with the rabbit-fur collar and pompoms I'd received on my last birthday, despite having mooned over its image in a magazine for months. (55)

▪ "Satire in extreme times is risky." (91)

▪ "I was astonished," Csilla says, "to hear you had an affair with Newman Small. He had such bad teeth!" (103)

▪ You can make six kinds of fool of yourself because you're a fool just for being old. You're off the hook for almost everything. (104)

▪ "Don't you know about Hungarian gloom? It's built-in." (106)

▪ How has Csilla managed to make her feel like a tedious, moralizing, beige-foundation-garmented Sunday-school teacher? (116-7)

▪ After leaving the employ of the bank I took to snoozing in our condo, coiled in the beanbag chair, with my tiny spiral soul glowing inside its carnal domicile. (149)

▪ "We're in the middle of a regime change, like the French Revvie. Power struggles! They were always changing the passwords. Wake up one morning, use yesterday's password, off with your head." (171)

▪ He'd witnessed the marriages among his parents' military set crumbling and falling apart, like slow-motion explosions. (201)

▪ My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don't say, "My heart is broken." We say "Are there any cookies?" One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom? (244-5)

Rant re the Cathars

At that time I was a collector of the many excuses people had come up with for butchering one another.

John, however, was well versed in heresies. No, he said, it wasn't Simon de Montfort, the lip-ripping eye-gouger, it was some drivelling Catholic abbot; and it wasn't Carcassonne, it was Béziers: a wall-to-wall cut-and-slash orgy and human barbecue, the stink must've been foul. If I was going to mess around in French history—which he didn't recommend, it was one bloodbath after another―I should at least get it straight. Anyway, stuff their persecution! They were heretics, it was their choice, what did they expect? They'd have been disappointed if no one had persecuted them, they were all masochists anyway, rolling around in their pain and getting off on it, fuck them, so three cheers for the Catholics, they were good at the persecuting, he'd say that for them. (21)

Peter Swanson. The Kind Worth Saving. Large Print. USA: HarperCollins, 2023.

What Henry Kimball really wants to do is write poetry, good poetry, but he's been failing at that, as he failed at teaching high school English and at being a policeman―failures in his own estimation; extenuating circumstances are forthcoming. Now he's a semi-competent P.I. who writes bad limericks. Into his office comes Joan Grieve, a former student whom he remembers. She was present on the fateful day when James Pursall shot her best friend Madison in front of the entire class. And himself. No motive was ever established for the bizarre event. Now she's wanting Henry to confirm that her husband, Richard Whalen, is having an affair with an employee in his real estate office: Pam O'Neil. Joan is self-confident and somewhat flirty; a complex woman, Henry thinks.

Thus begins Henry's alternating surveillance of Richard and Pam. His shaky technique lands him in an unavoidable conversation with Pam whom he finds quite attractive. They meet a few more times, including in her bed, Henry arguing with himself that it's to help his mission. Soon after, he follows her when she meets up with Richard in a vacant house for sale; she's told Henry she's going to break up with the man. Instead, they are shot dead before Henry can even enter the house. Police Detective Conroy pronounces it a murder-suicide. Meanwhile Joan's backstory shows that she got to know Richard as a teenager when their families vacationed in Maine. In like mind and common cause, they pledged to keep their friendship confidential, especially after committing a murder together.

There's me, thinking that their future and the rest of the book are totally predictable. Guess again. Swanson spins more than enough clever surprises to keep the reader off balance. Joan's secret friend has a private agenda unknown to her. A woman who tried to kill him has become Henry's best friend. Joan's older sister Lizzie is a published poet. Lily picks up the torch while Henry is hospitalized. Sociopaths aside, the mirroring aspects of two different couples are fascinating.

Henry

▪ "Don't be a stranger, hon," she said. "You can sit closer if you like." (63)

▪ Ever since being in Concord the day before I'd been thinking not just about Lily Kintner and my time as a Boston police detective, but about my life in general, and everything that led me here. (124)

▪ I still had a pretty good hairline, a cat who liked me, and my health. And I wasn't forty quite yet. (125)

▪ All morning I'd been telling myself I'd made a mistake by spending the night at Pam's. (164)

▪ "And then I came along and ruined being a police officer for you." (227)

▪ I have believed for a while that all poetry is saying the same thing―I am here―although what the poet really means is, I was there, because all poetry is just a letter to some future reader. (230)

▪ It wasn't just peace I felt, but I felt special. Lily had let me in. (237)

Joan

▪ Joan was always happiest when she had an enemy. (42)

▪ "Even if he lived, he wouldn't know I was trying to kill him. Thanks, Joan," he said. (54)

▪ "It'll be perfect, Richard, just like it always is. We do have a track record to protect, don't you think? (193)

▪ But the important thing, the only thing, was that Joan and Richard were strangers to one another, that no one knew how close they were, and that would always protect them. It was their superpower. (215)

▪ Richard had disappointed her, like every other stupid person on this planet. (333)

▪ It wasn't just that he was her partner, it was that he was the only one who knew how smart she really was. (337)

▪ "I don't care, Lizzie. Feel free to write as many dead brother-in-law poems as you like." (361)

Second and third thoughts

The only question now was whether there was any way Henry Kimball could prove it. Richard doubted it, because he'd been careful, and Joan had been careful. They always had been. Still, this asshole somehow knew. Had he told anyone else? Or was he just sniffing around, hoping to get more evidence? He wasn't a real cop, after all. He couldn't go back into that house in Bingham and start snooping around for DNA. But he could tell someone else to do it, couldn't he? (302-3)

A limerick

There once was a poet in permanent dread

Over the fact that we all wind up dead,

So he scribbled out verse,

Which just made it worse,

And decided to get laid more instead. (230)