Matt
"It did make a mess; but then, I don't think I'll ever be a very tidy person" Joan Foster (aka Louisa K Delacourt) may not be the best known of Atwood's protagonists, but she may be the most chaotically fun. This sly humour that permeated Edible Woman but was entirely absent from Surfacing is back with a vengeance, and having a better sense of Atwood's life around this time thanks to her memoir makes characters like the dour husband Arthur and the hapless intellectual revolutionaries of Toronto seem even more delightfully bitchy. Lady Oracle feels a bit more intellectually lightweight than much of Atwood's later work, but Joan's story has a lot to say about the expectations placed on women and the need for separate identities that at some point will crash together.
"It did make a mess; but then, I don't think I'll ever be a very tidy person" Joan Foster (aka Louisa K Delacourt) may not be the best known of Atwood's protagonists, but she may be the most chaotically fun. This sly humour that permeated Edible Woman but was entirely absent from Surfacing is back with a vengeance, and having a better sense of Atwood's life around this time thanks to her memoir makes characters like the dour husband Arthur and the hapless intellectual revolutionaries of Toronto seem even more delightfully bitchy. Lady Oracle feels a bit more intellectually lightweight than much of Atwood's later work, but Joan's story has a lot to say about the expectations placed on women and the need for separate identities that at some point will crash together.