That Consuming Hunger

By Melvin Maddocks

THE EDIBLE WOMAN by Margaret Atwood. 281 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

PROCEDURES FOR UNDERGROUND by Margaret Atwood. 79 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.75.

"Sensibility" is the word of faint praise that customarily damns women novelists. Yes, they do manage their little nuances so well--those pale violet insights into rather unimportant feelings. Nice sense of humor, too--this side of real bite, though. Still, no man can match them at describing parties--if that's what one really wants in a story. Will women writers, in other words, ever live down one of the world's most overanthologized short stories, Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party! Sensibility incarnate!

In her remarkable first novel, the Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, 30, might appear to be safely in the Mansfield tradition, role-playing at Woman Writer --"capital W, capital W" as Mary McCarthy has bitterly remarked. On its deceptive surface. The Edible Woman can be mistaken for an airy little comedy about a girl who works for a consumer-research company while resolving to marry a humorless young lawyer, too Mr. Right to be true.

Quietly Awful. But reader, beware. Behind this quiet, well-taught Garden Party-girl behavior, Atwood conceals the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail. She is one of the new sisterhood--like Novelist Joan Didion and Poet Anne Sexton--who seem to have sprung full-grown from condemned-property dollhouses. Hyper-observant, dangerously polite waifs, they look at the world with large, bruised eyes and gently whisper of loneliness, emptiness and casual cruelty.

Novelist Atwood's quietly awful vision is summed up in a throwaway line. "Hunger is more basic than love," she murmurs in a bizarre aside. "Florence Nightingale was a cannibal." Amid the situation-comedy ordinariness of her life, Marian, the title character of The Edible Woman, suddenly finds herself in a very unfunny predicament. People are trying to eat her up. Her employers feed upon her energy, her fiance feeds upon her sexuality.

Sickened at discovering that all life is a form of cannibalism, Marian gives up eating meat--and finally gives up eating altogether. Even cake comes to feel "cellular against her tongue, like the bursting of thousands of tiny lungs."

At this point, The Edible Woman assumes the force of a banal dream that has turned, without the dreamer's quite noticing, into a nightmare. The metaphor of cannibalism takes over until all the characters appear as predators. The only hope allowed Marian at the end: if she becomes a consumer again herself, life may appear "normal" to her once more.

Glacier's Edge. Nothing so simple will make life appear normal to her author. In her fourth published volume of poems, Procedures for Underground, Atwood compresses to an even more tactile intensity the panic that beats through her novel. Others may see evolution as a reasonably deserved survival of the fittest. Her gift, and her curse, is to see the universe as one living creature that survives only by devouring parts of itself. Even the cord of an electric typewriter can seem organic--a "hungry plug drinking a sinister transfusion."

Primeval isolation, a selfhood that is a mystery most of all to oneself, an animal sense of mortality--these are the terrors Miss Atwood has to offer. Technology, social sophistication, are transparent pretenses behind which man is naked, with drooling fang and club at the ready. Dealing in the artifices of well-made verse and well-made novel, she convincingly suggests that the overcivilized and the barbarous are one. Yet the Atwood message is beyond formulated pessimism; it has the rhythmic cycling of hope and despair natural to life itself. A lyricism as honest as a blade of grass in a boulder's crack keeps thrusting through. And so marriage, under the toughest scrutiny by Atwood the novelist, eventually is seen by Atwood the poet as "the edge of the receding glacier" where we crouch-- where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far

we are learning to make fire.

Which may be just about as far as the new sensibility can go.

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