DYSTOPIAN DYSFUNCTION
Unlikable characters make the story sputter where it should inspire
In Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women, a sly and ironic bit of doggerel published in the early 1990s, Margaret Atwood sets aside a moment to consider “the airheads, the bub-ble brains, the ditzy blondes: / the headstrong teenagers too dumb to listen to their / mothers.
“Ah the Eternal Stupid Woman!” Atwood writes, touching on Pandora, Eve, and the Bible’s foolish virgins.
Still, we must be grateful to them, the poet later says, because they have unknowingly “given us Literature.”
Atwood returns to the subject in her latest novel, The Heart Goes Last.
Atwood has written a dystopian sex comedy with a tone that often registers as less wisely despairing than jaded and contemptuous. Reading the novel, an alien visitor — another mainstay of speculative fiction — might wonder how such a deeply conflicted, vapid and intensely unlikable species came to dominate its world.
The dystopian elements of the novel take on a supporting role relative to the core tale of flawed humans and their poisonous relationships. In a not-distant future (an era when there are “prostibots” as well as a thriving Las Vegas and Elvis imitators still working in it), northeastern North America has been walloped by joblessness, foreclosures and poverty thanks to a steadily worsening economic landscape. Perhaps inspired by the company town of olden days, or by the gated communities and privatized prisons of our own day, one faceless corporation ingratiates itself as a kind of noble saviour: Its Positron Project offers utopian solace — a safe, easygoing and stable environment — to those afflicted by the perilous downturn. There’s a catch or two for those signing up, of course. And costs hidden in the fine print.
Not yet middle-aged, Charmaine and Stan are two such signees. Grumpily married, using their car as a home, they are panicked about dwindling finances. Charmaine, seemingly a ditzy blond, works as a server at a bar frequented by drug dealers and prostitutes.
Snide and bitter Stan is unemployed — and apparently “condemned to a life of frantic, grit-in-the-eyes, rancid-armpit wandering.” They barely hesitate and accept Consilience, the local prison-town where the promising social experiment will take place as an answered prayer.
In no time, Charmaine and Stan are secure behind the solid walls they’re contractually forbidden from exiting. In short: They’ve agreed to their own imprisonment in exchange for a piece of the pie — one modelled roughly on a cheery 1950s suburbia where a Doris Day character might spend her days smiling as she cleans and irons. The prison setting’s something that may speak to suburban commuters today as they’re bumper to bumper and pondering monthly car and mortgage payments.
Within Consilience, Charmaine and Stan are assigned jobs and a comfortable home they share with another couple. They never meet this couple because while they’re working and sleeping inside the town’s work-prison system, the other couple lives leisurely outside of it. The couples switch places once a month.
Soon, though, timid-on-the-surface Charmaine has wholly embraced lust, becoming a bawdy participant in an unprecedented, blisteringly hot affair with mysterious Max. She surprises even herself: “Sometimes she can’t believe what comes out of her mouth; not to mention what goes into it.” In comparison, her sporadic marital sex looks as appetizing as a TV dinner. Stan, meanwhile, finds a sexy note he assumes was written by Jasmine, the housemate he’s never met. He begins fixating on her and indulges in an elaborate fantasy about the porn-worthy acrobatics in their future.
But here’s the flaw: Aside from the creative listlessness of her U.S. dystopia, Atwood’s choice to make the characters unappealing, ridiculous and contemptible hinders emotional engagement with them.
In contrast to Oryx and Crake’s Jimmy and Glenn, who after all usher in the end of the world, Stan and Charmaine elicit little (Charmaine) to no (Stan) sympathy. Two self-serving, foolish and facile jerks stand at the heart of Heart. The comedy ridicules them: It’s at their expense. And because their unappetizing characteristics encourage onlookers to grow indifferent to their antics and dilemmas, their fates — good, bad or more of the same — matter not in the least.
Dystopian tales rely on readers caring about or identifying with the oppressed and victimized. If that’s taken away, so is the tale’s power to move, provoke and command attention.