Atwood's back with 'Grace'

By Darby Saxbe

Last year, a People magazine celebrity poll revealed that Winona Ryder, Tori Spelling, and Jamie Lee Curtis count Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted among their favorite reads. The popularity of that book, a spare tale of life in a mental ward, testifies to a '90s trend prompted by the introduction of psychiatric drugs like Prozac and Halcion and boosted by movies like Primal Fear and Shine.These days, mental illness is in. Margaret Atwood, Canada's ever-topical doyenne of letters, is no stranger to vogueishness herself, and her new novel Alias Grace, a 438-page dive into murder, sex, and psychoanalysis, outdoes her contemporaries with typical aplomb.

The story titillates, all the more so because it's true: Atwood bases her tale on a real-life homicide that scandalized Toronto in the 1850s. When gentleman Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper/paramour Nancy Montgomer were discovered brutally murdered in Kinnear's basement, blame fell on the servants, sixteen-year-old Grace Marks and her alleged lover James McDermot. At the beginning of Alias Grace, McDermot has been convicted and hung and Marks consigned to life in prison.

An upstart doctor, Simon Jordan, comes to town to test his pre-psychoanalytic theories on Grace. Her retelling of her tempestuous life alternates with accounts of Jordan's own struggles with a seductive landlady and scientific peers. These scholars are too busy being entranced by loopy disciplines like Mesmerism and Neuro-hypnosis to understand that Grace suffers from something quite akin to multiple-personality disorder.

Atwood fills "Alias Grace" with bumbling doctors, including the affable but clueless Dr. Jordan himself. His efforts, like those of the others, fall through. Atwood insists her readers piece together the fragments of the story themselves.

Appropriately, she uses the names of quilt patterns as chapter headings. The task of stitching disparate patterns together to form a new pattern resonates with the acts of reading and psychoanalysis -- as well the nature of schizophrenia itself. Atwood's choice of the quilt motif also jibes with her interest in questions of gender and the meaning of "women's work." Female artists and their creative struggles figured prominently in Lady Oracle, Cat's Eye, and Surfacing. Indeed, Atwood first learned of Grace Marks from the writings of Susanna Moodie, who chronicled life in the 19th century Canadian wilderness.

Unexpectedly, however, Atwood punches plenty of holes in the story provided by Life in the Clearings; Moodie comes across as more flaky than pioneering, as Dr. Jordan and his skeptical peers skewer her unfounded flights of fancy. Of course, their authority is actually just as shaky as Moodie's--Atwood mocks both the over-imaginative authoress and her falsely factual counterparts. Alias Grace has no hero, no voice of wisdom andclarity. The only voice is Grace's, plaintive and confused.

Atwood writes few historical novels, and her attempts to capture the diction of a 19th century narrator evidence some strain. Wry observations on popular culture enlivened her most recent novel, The Robber Bride, while her last short story collection, Good Bones and Simple Murders, retold fairy tales in breezy, slangy cadences. Alias Grace strips her of such contemporary crutches. Her writing is plainer than it's been since the nihilistic futurism of The Handmaid's Tale, and the reader sometimes longs for the droll asides of her more accessible work.

Luckily, Alias Grace is so juicily plotted it stays compelling. Atwood wrings beauty and pathos from Grace's hapless efforts to make sense of her own life. When the inept diagnosticians step aside, she delivers the promise that readers have been waiting for, and lets Grace to narrate her own story.

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