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Stan and Charmaine are living in their car, struggling through desperate poverty during a economic collapse. An advert for the positron project offers them a stable job and homes of their own: provided that every second month they swap their home for a prison cell. At first is well, but as they steadily become obsessed with their counterparts who are in their home while they take their turn in prison, their lives begin to unravel faster than the positron experiment itself.
This book is a mess. It’s entirely possible that I found it to be so because I misunderstood the premise, got off onto the wrong foot, and then was just confused about what the author wanted from me. But I found this hard going, and that’s even with all the goes-without-saying Margret Atwood brilliance, flair, and extraordinary sentence structuring.
Perhaps my problem starts at the beginning. The opening sequences with Stan and Charmaine trying to live out the car are poignant, well-written, and make you care about the characters. As someone who has been homeless, I found them particularly touching. Then Atwood placed them in a very pointed allegory about how US Prisons (amongst others) transform citizens into prisoners as economic units. Fantastic, think I. I’d been to conference about exactly this a few years ago and was excited at the prospect of an author of Atwood’s stature exposing this bleak reality.
But Atwood decides she’s bored with that, veers left, and turns our central characters into unlikeable morons whose heads are totally turned by the prospect of adultery. The plot becomes increasingly ridiculous, characters spring out of a hat into a cabaret of the bizarre, and by the end the story is more about sexbots and Elvis troupes than American poverty (moral and otherwise)
About two chapters from the end, I realised this was supposed to be a comedy. That could be my failing. I was so engaged by the horridness of their circumstances that I didn’t really find the steady descent into absurdity very funny. If gay Elvises being pimped to straight woman or a woman chemical modified to feel overwhelming sexual desire for a stuffed toy makes you laugh, maybe this will work for you. But I found myself trapped in a horrible world with people I didn’t like very much. Perhaps this is Atwood’s ultimate verdict on modern America. Either way, it’s still an Atwood novel, so it’s well written and may be one of the better books you read this year. But it could have been so much better.
