The Edible Woman

1969, 1992 Cox & Wyman edition
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
Original price £5.99, purchase price $1.98
Very worn paperback
B

Atwood's first published novel was actually written in 1965, as she discusses in her delightful if wry introduction.  (I know I keep saying how charming and wonderful author's prefaces, forewords, etc. are, as with Wodehouse, but I honestly feel that it's sometimes the best part of the book.)  So it's  "protofeminist rather than feminist."  Marian is as haphazard as a Lessing heroine, but Atwood plays this for farce.  It's not that Marian is as passive as Martha, but when she does take actions, they don't seem to lead to anything.  Even her cheating on her insufferable fiancé with pathological liar Duncan doesn't have clear results. 

There is a dark side to the novel, with Marian's eating disorder and the marriage of her friend Clara, but Atwood has a Catch-22 attitude about them, only funnier and more relatable than Heller's writing.  Roommate Ainsley's plans to become a single mother and then to find a "father image" for her baby are just as insane, particularly because she acts as if she's being perfectly sensible, sort of this book's version of Milo Minderbinder.

Atwood says, "The Edible Woman was conceived by a twenty-three-year-old and written by a twenty-four-year-old, and its more self-indulgent grotesqueries are perhaps attributable to the youth of the author, though I would prefer to think that they derive instead from the society by which she found herself surrounded."  I won't go into detail comparing this to The Handmaid's Tale, since I won't get to that book till 1985, but I can say here that the difference of 20 years is striking, with youthful/1960s optimism opposed to middle-aged/1980s pessimism.  Duncan playing with Marian's girdle has a very different feel than the fetishes of The Commander.  Not that this is an overly hopeful book, but there's a chance that Marian can save herself, and the forces of repression don't seem nearly as menacing.

It's all a joke, even if a dark one, from the title to the details, especially the surveys that Marian's company conducts.  Sometimes Atwood's humour is overly juvenile, with a couple of "I felt confused.  'I feel confused,' I said" type of lines.  The switch from first person narration to third and then briefly back to third is never explained, so I don't know if it's to show Marian being alienated from herself, or if it's youthful clumsiness.

Overall, not my favorite Atwood novel, nor the most challenging, but a much better start than either of the first two novels of her near contemporary Anne Tyler.