Love in the cage
Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopia is surprisingly sexy and sweet, even as it provokes serious questions about profitable prison Ponzi schemes
‘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 in a boardroom 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 America.
“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.” Atwood, a lifelong student of literature and history, describes societies where more than one husband or wife per person was the norm, and suggests that the historical breakdown of social labour more or less accounts for polygamy. I remind her that it’s only when Stan and Charmaine find themselves on solid economic footing that they begin to develop sexual relationships outside of their marriage. Atwood seems exasperated by my literalism: “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 long time,” 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 they’re interior lives have the vibe of a 1950s sitcom. Charmaine in fact is told several times that she’s “retro,” with her prim cotton shirts and good girl mentality. The book alternates between the couple’s points of view in the third person, so we see Charmaine as she thinks of herself, and we feel the annoyance Stan feels toward her and all of her bright-siding ways.
In the novel’s opening pages, 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.” Charmaine has agrin-and-bear-it sensibility about the whole situation. She suggests that eating day old doughnuts in the car for breakfast is “like a picnic” and tries to be pleasant, to be a soothing balm spread thin over their circumstances, regardless of her own ravaged nerves.
While watching her favourite television show from behind the counter at the low wage job she feels lucky to have, despite having a degree and previously working in a white collar eldercare facility, Charmaine sees a commercial for a community called Consillience which aims, like most advertising, to instill in the viewer the sense that a better life is within her grasp. Here, with Charmaine, it’s a bullseye. 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, with Lucinda Quant,” where a formerly respectable news anchor interviews people at the moment they are evicted from the homes they can no longer afford. “(Y)ou got to see all their stuff being piled on the lawn, such as their sofa and their bed and their TV, which was really sad, but also interesting, all the things they’d bought, and Lucinda asked them what happened to their life …”
I tell Atwood how funny and tragic and real I find The Home Front, and ask her about poverty porn and it’s place in our world. Not for the first time, she reminds me that 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 then you, and then ‘my dog died.’”
Consilience soon accepts Stan and Charmaine into their gated community, where they discover that the suburban experiment functions primarily as a privately owned prison system. Everyone within its walls alternate months in a Truman-showy 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 about. 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 now-defunct 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 experi- ence 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 it’s 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 to the reader that 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 and Stan’s king size bed.
Sex, Atwood says, “tends to fire their spark plugs.” Charmaine and Stan are bored of each other, bored in general, and want to feel that juicy surge of excitement that accompanies sexual discovery. “If you’re bored, you’re usually bored of yourself! People embark on these adventures, because the other person makes you feel more exciting to yourself than you have been feeling recently,” Atwood says.
Despite having written a novel that explores how sexual chemistry connects to our abilities to fully determine our own lives, Atwood seems relatively flippant about the whole orgasmic enterprise. Sex, she explains, and the desire for those first thrilling sparks of desire early in a relationship, are “an ongoing human motif.” The actual business of sex is, I take it, less interesting to her than the literary possibilities opened up by thinking about desire. “I read an article about a woman who had tried Ashley Madison,” she tells me, “and it had been such a flop. She hooked up with a guy who had erectile dysfunction problems!”
Atwood describes herself as “never a Calvinist,” when I push her a bit to explain some of the motivations behind Charmaine, a character I found particularly frustrating. A child of abuse and befalling considerable hardship as an adult, Charmaine in my reading seems to shrug off her own accountability for her actions, always blaming circumstances or her limited options. She rejects responsibility, bending over backwards to find virtue in her ability to anticipate what other people want and to simply give it to them. Her private thoughts are constantly sugaring over her reality. “A lot of people out there are like that,” Atwood says. “They don’t want to have to make the big deci- sions because they — it’s too much for them.” I ask her what the point is, and she flashes a Cheshire grin and says, “Exactly.”
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. Alias Grace was set in Kingston Pen. You can’t get through English literature without thinking about prisons,” Atwood says, citing her experience as a 19th century lit scholar and how Dickens’s childhood, spent with his mother in debtor’s prison, affected his writing.
And yet, Atwood assures me, 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. “What are the rules we can obey in? And enough people have to agree about, so there’s not just people robbing, stealing, and murdering all the time. But who’s the enforcer of those rules?” The questions pile up. Inside Atwood’s profitable American prison community, hiphop has been outlawed. It is the only mention, however coded, of blackness I noticed in the book, most of which is set in an American prison.
When I begin framing an interview question by saying prison, as an institution is adaptable to institutionalized forms of oppression, citing the Canadian example of the vastly overrepresented number of Aboriginal people in prison, Atwood interrupts me to say, “No question. In the States, it’s black men.” Thinking of Angela Davis, the radical writer activist four years Atwood’s junior who regularly agitates for the end of prisons, I ask Atwood if she considers herself a prison abolition-
‘I read about a woman who tried Ashley Madison ... She hooked up with a guy with erectile dysfunction!’
ist. She considers my question, then tells me “I think we need to rethink prisons. 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,” she says. “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.”
Eventually Stan and Charmaine do manage to orchestrate something like an escape from the book’s literal prison. Their bodies are free, but it’s their wills one is left to worry about. Among the unanswered questions of The Heart Goes Last is this: how can we all decide on the rules together when for so many among us, as Atwood puts it, making such a decision is “too much for them.”