Books: Time Arrested

CAT'S EYE

by Margaret Atwood

Doubleday; 446 pages; $18.95

The shopper, a woman nearing 50, pauses before a cosmetics counter. "I'd use anything if it worked," she reflects. "Slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip-drip of time, stay more or less the way I am."

And then Elaine Risley moves on. She is poignantly aware that all the rejuvenating creams and unguents in the world are useless against the abrasions of time. Only two devices have ever been known to arrest the years: memory and art. She puts both to use in this quirky, brilliant evocation of a childhood seen from the middle of the journey.

For almost a decade, Margaret Atwood's fellow Canadians have dubbed her the "high priestess of angst." If the title is not exactly flattering, it is not entirely unfair. Most of her previous two dozen volumes of poems and fiction were freighted with allegorical misery: The Edible Woman feels herself cannibalized by family and friends; the paleontologist of Life Before Man views the people around her as potential fossils; in The Handmaid's Tale, a future America goes to hell when it is taken over by religious fundamentalists. But in Cat's Eye, Atwood jettisons her old techniques in favor of recognizable landscapes and more plausible griefs.

Elaine is a painter based in British Columbia, "as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning." Only a retrospective of her works lures her back. But the praise of young feminists seems ignorant or condescending, and the town's gleaming new facades have an even worse effect. "Underneath the flourish and ostentation," she decides, "is the old city . . . malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable. In my dreams of this city I am always lost."

This sense of loss appears and reappears in a series of densely detailed flashbacks. It begins when her father, a field naturalist, abandons the lyrical Canadian woods for a university job. She and her brother exchange a "rootless life of impermanence and safety" for the urban wilderness of conformity and cliques. The boy, a prodigy, retreats into a private world of abstruse science and physics. Elaine seeks acceptance by her peers, a gaggle of victimizing girls led by a meanspirited brat named Cordelia. Atwood understands that no subsequent humiliations can ever cut so deep as those of youth. The cruelties done to the narrator become sources of a melancholia that affects the rest of her days.

Atwood is 49, her father was an entomologist, and she spent her early years in the Canadian woods before moving to Toronto. It would be easy to view this novel as one more thinly fictionalized autobiography. But Cat's Eye is no mere tracing of events. It is concerned, not to say obsessed, with the occurate representation of youthful feelings.