Motley with Method

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Despite her oddities, Joan Foster becomes a character who genuinely engages the reader's sympathy and suggests that within every classically shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel — the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting. Even the baggiest literary shapes require a greater certainty about life than heroine — or author — can muster. "It did make a mess," says Joan Foster as she sums up her life at the end of Lady Oracle. But if more tidy, it might be less true.

Le Anne Schreiber