The Robber Bride
By Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 466 pages, $23.50
In “Happy Endings,” one of her slyest short stories, Margaret Atwood indeed offers the reader a happy ending, even if it is only version A, and then works herself through the alphabet to version F, adding complications galore. But these variations, merely details of plot, are “just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.” Much more preferable, she confides, is “How and Why.”
Yet every fiction must offer a wide array of Whats as a necessary fuel for How and Why. “The Robber Bride,” Atwood’s latest novel, begins with her distinctive and well-honed social wit, as three middle-aged women who like to “feel younger, and more daring, than they are,” share a lunch table at the Toxique, a Toronto restaurant striving mightily for an air of decadence.
Before too long, someone from their younger days appears and sits at a nearby table: Zenia, “aphid of the soul”; nomadic Zenia, with no life of her own except the one she briefly shares with others until she learns how to destroy it; Zenia, the nemesis they thought they’d seen the last of, having attended her supposed funeral five years earlier. But there she sits, returned for what will be her Waterloo, “waves of ill will” flowing out of her “like cosmic radiation.”
The three friends, Tony, Charis and Roz, leave in disarray, without confronting her. How can they, yet? They first have to struggle with the reawakened memories of Zenia’s determined havoc: lies of every color, plagiarism, blackmail, embezzlement, extortion and, worst of all, home wrecking-turning these friends’ men into “occupied territory” during each of her periodic invasions. And because Zenia is “the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets,” she always leaves, indifferent to the ravaged landscape and the festering wounds behind her.
Zenia’s return from the dead is, in a fundamental way, no real surprise to Tony, Charis and Roz: Her “malign vitality” has long kept her alive in their imaginations. For though Zenia “likes breaking and entering,” it is also true that “people like Zenia can never step through your doorway, can never enter and entangle themselves in your life, unless you invite them in.”
Discovering and confronting this knowledge is the challenge facing these three women as, over the next few days, they separately track down Zenia at a downtown hotel.
Tony-in this novel, the first among equal victims-is a university professor and war historian who saves money on clothes and “spends it on airplane tickets for visits to the sites of battles.” At home, Tony likes to “replay decisive battles, to see if they could conceivably have been won by the losing side.” Such speculative outcomes are, the reader comes to understand, manageable variations on the campaigns Tony’s parents waged against her and each other when she was a child.
Charis works at Radiance, a New Age knick-knack shop soon to be renamed Scrimpers, in response to a punishing recession. Her dazed ways, flowered shawls and flowing dresses cover a core of hidden strength. Charis has emotional scar tissue so thick it might very well be muscle.
Roz, president of a successful business, is one of “Toronto’s Fifty Most Influential.” Though optimism is Roz’s “psychic vitamin,” she is also a clothes-horse whose every new outfit is a futile search for her essential self. But Roz, caught between her mother’s Catholicism and her father’s Jewishness, imagines herself forever a displaced person-Canada’s infelicitous label for refugees of all persuasions.
Indeed, despite their differences, this is what unites these three friends: childhoods damaged by unloving adults and the family dislocations of World War II. Their own adult lives and their marriages are an unsatisfying echo of their childhoods. They are all displaced persons, and Atwood spreads out their emotional landscapes like the campaign map that Tony keeps in her basement because this is where the campaign against Zenia must be fought-in the interior battlegrounds of bitter memory, of unforgotten losses.
Yet what has been lost? Charis’ vulgar Billy, Tony’s beside-the point West and Roz’s slimy Mitch are men unworthy of the ache their absence engenders. They accomplish their betrayals as a matter of course, simply giving in to a stereotypical male predisposition as easily as a pillow yields to pressure.
In some ways Zenia did these three women a terrible favor, having “switched the plot” of their lives, interrupting the dreary re-creation of their unhappy childhoods. Perhaps it was an interruption they somehow longed for, harboring a secret admiration for Zenia’s rapacity and lawlessness. How else could her assumed identities so easily dovetail with her intended victims’ hidden point of entry?
It makes great sense, then, when Tony, replaying her own personal battle, realizes that “in order to defeat Zenia she will have to become Zenia.” Fortunately, Tony also realizes the strategic dangers of “imagine your enemy,” knowing that “every sober-sided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets.” Tony, who has the ability to read, speak and even sing backwards, now must somehow reverse the flow of her anger.
She has a difficult task ahead of her, as have Charis and Roz, because Zenia-an extraordinary fictional creation-is an elemental, malicious force. She’s as DP as they come, with a specially tailored past for everyone she meets, and an absolutely wonderful liar. Even when her prevarications are on the verge of unraveling, Zenia can turn on a dime and tell another tale, embellishing while the reader gasps at her malignant ingenuity.
Because Zenia’s “fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total,” when the four women finally re-encounter each other and the novel unfurls its multiple endings, even Tony’s professional belief in “the salutory power of explanation” offers little help in uncovering what drove Zenia in her private war against others. “Who was the enemy?” Tony asks. “Where was her battlefield? Not in any one place.”
This novel, with all its psychological acuity, its masterly navigation of the shoals of memory, is also a story as elemental as one of those “authentic fairy tales in the gnarly-tree editions, not a word changed, all the pecked-out eyes and cooked bodies and hanged corpses and red-hot nails intact.” And it’s a tale in which the women claim the starring roles, just as Roz’s twin daughters used to insist on for their bedtime stories.
“The Robber Bridegroom” becomes “The Robber Bride,” mixed in with “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Girl Who Cried Wolf.” Unfortunately, this accentuates one of the weaknesses of “The Robber Bride,” for the male characters, their inner lives too little hinted at, have the limited range of pawns. More seriously, some of the novel’s many endings unfortunately approach a sitcom patness, an alarming lapse for a writer of Atwood’s stature.
Despite those flaws, the novel’s elusive truths can be gleaned from ample servings of How and Why. The reader revels in Atwood’s trenchant revelations, her droll and tender ironies, and her deep sympathy for characters who slowly unfold for themselves and for us as well.
We all entertain monsters like Zenia in our lives. They nest inside us, creating bad neighborhoods we can never really avoid, perhaps because the history of our frightening Other, however hidden, is all too frequently our own. Little wonder, then, that with “The Robber Bride,” her eighth novel, Margaret Atwood continues her long-running roll, offering us the good fortune of yet another disturbing and brilliantly conceived work of fiction.
