![]() ![]() So Atwood cheerfully makes a place on their behalf. Women’s weakness lies in their scruples their failure to make a place for their own mean and ungraceful instincts alongside the pretty ones. It is up to women to be strong enough to enjoy them or take adequate measures against them. Behind it all, of course, it is the male world that inflicts major pain, but Atwood’s message is that men are like the weather-a few of them nice, most of them dangerous-and that blaming them is a waste of time. We meet women helping women-not very competently, because of damage or inhibition. In “The Robber Bride” we meet women hurting women-very competently, particularly when mothers or rivals do the hurting. It is not just an author we visit but a country. As one would say: a new Updike or a new Roth or, years ago, a new Wodehouse or, a century ago, a new Trollope. ![]() ![]() She is one of three woman friends pitted against a woman enemy in what by now should be called, not a new novel by Margaret Atwood but simply: a new Atwood. She is set, along with three considerably inferior stones, in an excess of ordinary fictional scrollwork. ![]()
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