Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood

In all the kerfuffle around the hotly debated Favorite Books of the Secretly Jerky, there was a fair amount of THE BLIND ASSASSIN, WOMEN, JERKS TOO, etc., which behooved us all to remember that ladies can also be predictable little snowflakes with suspicious tastes in literature.

But, you know, step off the Atwood (well, actually, you don’t need to step off Blind Assassin per se, it’s a little too SOUTHERN ONTARIO GOTHIC for words, and everyone in Canada treats her like Dark Galadriel from the LOTR movies now so she gets to keep four hundred more pages than anyone else’s editor would permit), because a) she wrote one of the greatest works of 20th century speculative fiction, which was spare and clean and not even a bit bloated, and b) Cat’s Eye.

Cat’s Eye is the best. You can read Cat’s Eye every year. And it was her follow-up to Handmaid’s Tale, making the mid-to-late 1980s an extraordinary time to be reading her.

There’s a moment near the beginning of the novel in which our protagonist, now an artist and an adult, is being interviewed and asked about how the experience of being a Woman in the Seventies and Eighties has shaped her feminist art, and she attempts, somewhat crisply, because the interviewer is a bitch, to explain that her experience of the world is far more accurately described as having been influenced by being a child during WWII than by any later reorganization of society. Her relationships, her idea of how women are to each other, her concept of OBJECTS (privation! making do!), etc., and even though you never want to say LIKE YOU, MARGARET ATWOOD, because that’s almost always stupid, it’s extremely difficult not to use that moment to really step back and look at Atwood’s body of work and see WWII and not, you know, a more pat statement about Women in the Seventies and Eighties.

So, Cat’s Eye. All of the cruelty of female childhood friendship in one glorious book.

Atwood is in the news right now for having been unsuccessfully dissed by Doug Ford, juiceboxy brother of Rob Ford, Toronto’s exceptionally lame mayor, who responded to Atwood’s intense lobbying against cuts in library funding with ‘who the hell is this Atwood person, and why should I care?’

Which, obviously, you just can’t get away with here. She’s a national treasure, and you know she’d kill you and make it look like an accident.

But then, this a man who complained that there were more libraries in his district than Tim Hortons outlets, which is really a DUELING CANADIAN LOYALTIES moment, but nothing to admit to out loud.