Out of the Woods

By Melvin Maddocks

SURFACING by MARGARET ATWOOD

224 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

As some other people are connoisseurs of wine, Margaret Atwood is a connoisseur of pain. She is acquainted with vintages. She can identify all the best anguishes blindfolded.

But even a connoisseur must specialize within the specialty. In this novel

Miss Atwood continues where she left off in The Edible Woman, chronicling the particular pains of being female in the '70s.

Her nameless narrator is Canadian, like herself, and a bit younger--in her late 20s. A commercial artist making a perfunctory living by illustrating children's books, she has left her husband and her own child. "A divorce," she observes with her dreadful gift for understatement, "is like an amputation; you survive, but there's less of you."

The problem for Miss Atwood's antiheroine is that she has been divorced from far more than a husband.

She and her urbanized--worse, Americanized--friends seem to make no connections at all even within their own free-floating selves. Like a supercasual Dante, Miss Atwood pronounces sentence upon her generation of lost and damned: "Any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn't notice."

She has devised her hell for pseu-dosophisticated young Canadians and a make-do formula for living in it: "If it hurts, invent a different pain." Like a good Canadian, Miss Atwood conceives of the ultimate pain as a kind of terminal frostbite: the frozen state of feeling nothing, even pain. Her narrator thinks she may have arrived at this last circle, only to discover she is not quite so dead as she presumed.

Child. Her father, who has been living alone in a cabin on a remote northern Quebec lake, is reported missing. Accompanied by her lover (a failed potter) and another couple, who use the occasion to film a glib backwoods documentary ("A marginal economy and grizzled elderly men, it's straight out of Depression photo essays"), the daughter returns to this scene of her childhood to hunt for her father.

As the quartet sets up headquarters in the cabin and conducts random searches, the daughter finds herself tracking ancestors more distant than her father. She comes upon what appear to be copies of rock paintings among her father's papers, then decides these atavistic scrawls are original visions, uniting her father with the first cave painter, his archetypal self.

She too resolves to "become like a little child again, a barbarian," a primitive, psychically joining with her father and all the Jungian forefathers. Step by step she regresses into a private wilderness, beyond the last camper's garbage, the last hunter's slaughtered bird, the last echo of the defoliating chain saw.

If modern man is suffering the pain of turning into his own machine, the author argues in effect, why not let him choose the less ignominious old organic pain of being an animal? Much of this sounds modish and empty. But Margaret Atwood, alternately satirical and lyrical, is a mistress of controlled hysteria. She skillfully presses her polarized universe upon her reader and indeed upon her race. She may be excessively hard on civilization. But, as only a really gifted writer can, she turns paranoia into art, forcing her rapidly industrializing fellow countrymen -- her rap idly overindustrializing world -- to contemplate the hate in the bloody eye of one of their victims: the "pure pain, clear as water, an animal's at the moment the trap closes." sbMelvin Maddocks

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