The Robber Bride [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Where Atwood excels is in the irony (sarcasm?) she employs to balance the trivialness of the three women's possessions against the mean-spirited cruelty of their 'friend.' Tony the scholar, a historian in a "man's field" (the history of warfare), a mouse of passivity whose secret pleasure is envisioning the brutality of men at war, loves her huge, bungling West beyond even her own reason. Roz is a scatterbrained monster of middle-class rectitude and her husband a mediocre lawyer who took her as a suburban trophy wife. Charis, a flower-child and perennial waif, takes into her life a worthless vagrant on the lam from his American draft board and would be well rid of him, were it not for the humiliating way that Zenia takes him.

That odd glance in the mirror concludes the last twenty pages of the novel, in which each woman reflects on her personal contest with Zenia and each, in her own way, comprehends the debt she owes Zenia (a debt summed up in the epigraph from Jessamyn West: "A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing"). I remember telling someone, while explaining what I consider the greatest excellence of the book, that I was terrified, as we got closer to the end, lest Atwood might try a final magic trick and make this despicable bitch as human and sympathetic as she had each of the others. Instead, she lets her heroines forgive Zenia and then, in closing, this sudden image, the alien eye looking back.

This extraordinary book, about the passion of love in ordinary people, and the damage that can be caused by a person who seems extraordinary only because she defines herself entirely by contraries. Zenia loves no one. Not even for the brief moment when she is taking possession of each man does she feel any affection for him. She makes nothing; her creative act is to destroy what others have made. She is free only in the sense that she lives on the labor and property of others: the freedom of thieves. There is nothing admirable about her. Even, as Roz points out, her breasts are fake.

It is easy to mistake Atwood's clear-eyed objectivity for cynicism. No one, in Atwood's world, is worthy of love, it falls upon us like God's redeeming grace. And there is so little of it that we can understand stealing it. But Zenia doesn't steal; she spoils. Therein is her evil and this makes her so much less than her three adversaries with their meagre treasures. Atwood offers, at one point, a brilliant definition of love, when Tony says of her husband, "He was boring, like our own children." This is the love that ignores merit and measure and worth. This is the love that survives bad breath in the morning and infidelity. The terrible mystery of love, that it is fragile, misplaced, at once nurturing and poisonous, is the key to this book.

Read it for the prose, elegant, ironic, and rich. Read it for the wonderful twins, and the grand letdown of the secret Roz's son is hiding. ("Oh is THAT all!" his mother sighs with relief.) Read it for the brilliantly three-dimensional picture of what it was to be an adult and female in the Americas of the eighties.

Read it for the tour-de-force point of view. I'll never forget the first time I read it. I loved Tony and found Roz crude and Charis silly. Then Roz began to tell the story and I discovered she was fascinating beneath the bourgois surface. Tony seemed boring and Charis slightly mad. Then Charis stepped forward and the magic trick happened again, truly magic as we saw how little Tony and Roz understood "crazy Charis" and the Karen who became her.

I crawled to the end of the book terrified that Atwood had in store one last tap of the wand, to give Zenia her day at the podium and convince me, against my will, that she too was wonderful.

Atwood writes gloriously about love; here and in Alias Grace she renders so well the insanity it reduces us to, for all its necessary role in our lives. It is, finally, the inability to love that makes Zenia incomplete. And it love itself, not the objects of their love, that makes Tony, Roz, and Charis great and good.