Deep in this highly readable and entertaining first novel by Margaret Atwood is a statement that I take to be its thesis: A person doesn't live by principles; a person lives by adjustments. That is true of the protagonist, Marian, a young woman in Toronto on a path toward a "normal" life of marriage and children. Atwood subverts what could have been a dreary domestic novel with a text that is just slightly off-kilter and studded with oddities. The old social and sexual patterns are very much in evidence in this 1969 book, but they are straining to break the leash.
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