ATWOOD ON INFIDELITY ...
... Misery porn, and prisons
“You’re asking me,” Margaret Atwood says, “are people innately monogamous? It would seem not. Do we want to be? In our society, it would appear so.” We’re sitting at her publisher’s office, just a few days after the Ashley Madison leak became a big news story, and a few weeks ahead of the release of her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last. Infidelity plays a significant part, as a young, albeit rather oldfashioned, married couple named Charmaine and Stan navigate new lives inside an experimental community in some destitute near-future United States.
“Ashley Madison: So these are all people who think, ‘Let’s have an affair,’ but without destroying their marriages. What’s all that about? Well, it’s about what people have been doing for quite a long time.” Why? “They’re bored,” she says. “It’s not something that would ever appeal to me, but if you think that’s not been an underlying motif in human society for a longtime,” she says, citing the biblical King David and Bathsheba, the pair who fell in lust while she was still married to a soldier in the king’s own army. “What can I tell you? It’s an ancient motif because our motives are mixed.”
Desire, a motive if ever there was one, can be tricky to mix, but there are parts of The Heart Goes Last that read as surprisingly sexy, where other scenes paint sexual desire as a kind of goofy, even sweet vulnerability. Stan and Charmaine may live in the near future, but their interior lives have the vibe of a 1950s sitcom.
The couple are living a hard life out of their car after a capitalist calamity: “the whole system fell to pieces, trillions of dollars wiped off the balance sheet like fog off a window. There were hordes of two-bit experts on TV pretending to explain why it happened — demographics, loss of confidence, gigantic Ponzi schemes — but that was all guesswork bullsh-t. Someone had lied, someone had cheated, someone had inflated the currency. Not enough jobs, too many people.”
While watching her favourite TV show from behind the counter at the low-wage job she feels lucky to have, despite having a degree and previously a white-collar job, Charmaine sees a commercial for a community called Consilience — which aims, like most advertising, to instil in the viewer the sense that a better life is within her grasp.
Atwood’s at- a- slant comedy about life during deep economic recession is dark and miserable, but hilarious in the details. Charmaine’s favourite show is The Home Front, where a formerly respectable news anchor interviews people at the moment they are evicted from the homes they can no longer afford.
Asked about Home Front, poverty porn and its place in our world, Atwood again says there is nothing new under the sun: “There used to be a show called Queen for a Day,” she says of the classic game show, “a radio show, and the contestants went on and told about the horrible times they were having, and the contestant who had the most horrible time got to be Queen for a Day, and would win washers and dryers and got showered with stuff, sponsored by companies.” She calls it misery porn, “It was about how much worse a time people were having than you, and then ‘my dog died.’”
Consilience soon accepts Stan and Charmaine into its gated community, where they discover the suburban experiment functions primarily as a privately owned prison system. Everyone within its walls alternates months in a suburban civilian life and a similarly overdetermined life inside a remodelled penitentiary. While Charmaine and Stan are inside the prison, their tasteful two-bedroom home is occupied by counterparts, another couple about whom they are discouraged from learning anything. Against her better judgment, Charmaine begins an affair with the man who lives in her house while she and Stan are in prison.
The Heart Goes Last, which grew out of a serialized set of stories Atwood wrote for the nowdefunct startup The Byliner in 2012, grapples with the notion of free will. There is the prison-industrial complex, where a privately owned urban community operates only because its denizens give over their freedom (though ostensibly only half the time). And there is the question of where our will arises from in the first place, if our deeply held desires are a condition of our freedom or an innate hindrance to them.
Stan and Charmaine experience some sexual trouble, unable to give each other what they both truly want, even if their union is loving and supportive. Charmaine wants the sweet stability Stan represents, but her affection for her husband is generally rated PG-13 at its hottest. Stan wishes Charmaine would desire him with urgency, with abandon, with all the tropes of pulled hair and rapidly removed clothing. He wants her appetite for him to transform her from prim and considered into passionate animal. It will come as no surprise Charmaine enters into her trysts with the other man with a ravenous fervour. She thrills at saying and doing things in the context of her secret life that would never cross her mind in the comfort of her king-sized bed with Stan.
Prison, of course, is a metaphor as much as a reality, and Charmaine is happiest in the one she’s built in her own head. “I’ve been thinking about prisons for a long time,” Atwood says. “Alias Grace was set in Kingston Pen. You can’t get through English literature without thinking about prisons.”
And yet, she respects that prison is an exploitative institution with real-world consequences, and not just a literary device. “We all have to agree on the rules,” she says. “So there’s not just people robbing, stealing and murdering all the time.”
Would Atwood abolish prisons? “I think we need to rethink prisons,” she says. “We can’t abolish prisons, unless we’re going to kill dangerous offenders. So it’s either kill them, imprison them, or let them out.
“On the other hand, arresting every kid ever found with a joint and sticking them in jail is a very stupid use of our taxpayers’ dollars.”