Atwood understands this. “When you publish a book, it’s not your book anymore,” she told me. “It belongs to the readers. If nobody’s reading the book then it’s just lying there. It’s inert, like a musical score that nobody plays.” And being so highly esteemed has its advantages: It was fun to go to the Emmys, Atwood said—she took two women from her office, and they had a “screamingly good time.” She would be lying if she said she wasn’t pleased that so many people were still reading The Handmaid’s Tale, and that there was so much anticipation for The Testaments. “But it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t pleased. The same thing would still be happening.”
And yet, to publish a sequel after so long is to inevitably suggest that it is her book, and her world, after all. The Testaments isn’t the story that many devout Handmaid’s Tale readers might expect. It complicates characters who once seemed simple, and tangles up easy judgments. It asserts its author’s stamp on a fictional landscape without shutting itself off to subjective interpretation. When I asked Atwood why so much of her work featured the testimonies of women, she thought for a second, then described it as an “archeological” interest in the unreliable nature of storytelling. “Things that are buried come to light. Things that are hidden are revealed.” But, “being the kind of novelist I am,” Atwood said, “there’s usually—in fact there’s always—something we don’t know.”
We all know that men don’t understand women. How could they? Women spend the whole time trying to understand themselves. “I specialize in women,” the writer Nancy Hale said in 1942. “Women puzzle me.” Hale felt that she knew how, “in a given situation, a man [was] apt to react.” (She’d been married three times by the age of thirty-four.) Women, on the other hand, vexed and intrigued her. Her mother, the portraitist Lilian Westcott Hale, made a career of looking at other women, including her daughter. In The Life in the Studio (1969), a memoir about growing up with wealthy, bohemian parents, Nancy describes being posed “propped up against pillows, at the age of six months . . . at the age of one, seated in a baby carriage . . . at six wearing a dark-blue straw hat with red cherries.” She hated it. “While people who paid for portraits by my mother might get their own way about what they wore in them, I, who had been since infancy the built-in, free artist’s model around that house, never had any such say.”
When the judges opened their packages, each found a stack of unbound copy paper. Each judge’s name had been printed across every page in large gray letters. It made the book slightly difficult to read, Guo said.
“I think we all felt, ‘This is such a rigmarole, it better be worth it,’” MacGregor said. “And then of course when we opened it: ‘Oh, yeah, it was worth it.’”
The first time I opened my mouth in college it was on the topic of devil’s advocacy. It was September 1993, and we were having a policy discussion in my Core humanities class: the teacher asked whether we should allow people to make comments they don’t agree with, “just for the sake of argument?” No one could see what the problem with doing so might be, so I spoke up. I argued against, passionately and persuasively. I won the others over: for the rest of the year that class had a “no DA policy.”
The argument I gave was that devil’s advocacy undermines the trust on which conversation is grounded. Why should we take someone seriously if she herself doesn’t believe what she is saying? Conversational progress is predicated on sincerity and openness, because only those willing to put their cards on the table are in a position to learn—or be learned from. I wasn’t aware of the oft-tweeted phrase “the devil has enough advocates,” but it would have fit right into my rousing speech.
My case against devil’s advocacy was, however, insincere. The truth is, I was just playing devil’s advocate.
The Great Peace had begun, and the austere verses of the medieval Warring States era gave way to a poetry of languor; to ghost tales and samurai vendettas of the Kabuki theatre. A constant theme was the fragility of existence, as earthquakes, floods and fires erased the city again and again. In the twenty-first century, that sense of the fragile still holds, though it is real estate development, rather than natural disasters, that alter the landscape. Many neighborhoods I first saw in 2001 have transformed almost past recognizing.
But the Tokyo I once moved through, and other Tokyos I arrived too late ever to know, still exist in the city’s rich, complex literature. When I’m homesick for Tokyo, I return to its books. Kafū Nagai on the Sumida’s eastern bank before the 1923 earthquake; Yukio Mishima’s nostalgic take on the early twentieth-century Belle Époque. Yasunari Kawabata’s elegant novels written when the United States occupied Japan. And other Tokyos I haven’t seen yet – Hideo Furukawa’s Dream Island made of compacted trash, or one of Haruki Murakami’s landscapes, with its vacant lots, closed-off alleys, dry ancient wells.
The first Chinese restaurants had to improvise because they weren’t able to find Chinese ingredients, he said. But the problem was especially pronounced in Newfoundland. It was nearly impossible to get even basic ingredients, like soy sauce or bok choy, imported onto the island. Even egg noodles — the “mein” in “chow mein” — were difficult to come by. One of those enterprising early restaurateurs improvised by cutting cabbage into thin strips, so that they’d resemble, at least in appearance, thin noodles. He started calling it chow mein, and it stuck.
To this day, “chow mein” in Newfoundland means thin strips of cabbage, stir-fried with veggies and meat. For noodles, Mr. Yu said, you have to ask for them specifically, by ordering “Cantonese chow mein on noodles.” The sign on the door was a recent addition, he said, after tourists started getting confused.
So, we used to eat on the floor. We didn’t have a table. I know it sounds unbelievable, because everyone’s got a table, but there was no table in the house, that’s how poor we were. It didn’t bother me. I would have been – what? – four? five years old? Life was a party, nothing mattered. I believed what anyone would have believed at that age, that the world came predesigned without tables in dining rooms, that the world, at its most basic, lacked certain things, and that people in every home in the country ate the same way we did, with a tablecloth spread on the floor – ours was lime green with stains where various things had been spilled – and four cushions that served as chairs.
Later, there was a table, I think we brought it over from my grandmother’s old house, in perfect condition, though over time it began to wobble. I don’t know why, if there was a table in grandmother’s house, we spent months and probably years eating off the floor, but Armando must have wanted it that way, it must have been part of his Spartan plan, his frugal plan, his new man plan.
Sometimes I found myself wondering how many of the women indulging this fantasy would, in some future real-life Gilead, become not Handmaids but Wives. This was, it turns out, not only a judgmental thought but a simplistic one. Atwood has now written a sequel, “The Testaments” (Nan A. Talese), set fifteen years after the first book ends. The new novel, like its predecessor, is presented as a story assembled from historical artifacts, with an epilogue that depicts a twenty-second-century academic conference about Gilead. But, in “The Testaments,” Handmaids and Wives hardly enter the picture at all. Instead, it is about the Aunts, and three of them in particular: one whom we already know from the first book, and who, we learn, helped to establish Gilead’s shadow matriarchy, within a thicket of rapists; one who was raised inside Gilead, and who grew up devout and illiterate and expecting to be married by the age of fourteen; and one who is sent to Gilead, as a teen-ager, by the resistance, which is based in Canada, and which carries out reconnaissance missions and helps citizens of Gilead to escape.
The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. She has said that “The Testaments” was inspired by readers’ questions about the inner workings of Gilead, and also by “the world we’ve been living in.” But it seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become.
Gregor’s novel has many delights—the taunt prose, the wry depiction of gay men in a sterilized New York City, the bemused renderings of academe that ring all-too-true to someone, like myself, who has spent much of his adult life in the university—but one of the more subtle triumphs is the character of Richard himself. He is a spoiled twenty-something who cannot, bless him, adult and, therefore, resorts to manipulating others into taking care of him. I often hear folks crow about the likability of characters in novels, as if that were the threshold to enjoying a story. In truth, likability is often beside the point. So imagine my delight in reading Gregor’s imminently unlikable Richard. He lies, he cheats, he exploits, he takes advantage—and it is oh-so-delicious to read.
Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressively erudite and impossibly cuddly.” Sacks comes across as singular. For many years, he lived by himself on City Island, not far from Manhattan, in a house he acquired when he swam out there, saw a house he liked, learned that it was for sale, and bought it that afternoon, his wet trunks dripping in the real estate agent’s office. He regularly swam for miles in the ocean, sometimes late at night. He loved cuttlefish and motorcycles, which he rode, drug-fueled, up and down the California coast when he was a neurology resident at UCLA. A friend of his from that time recalled, “Oliver wouldn’t behave, he wouldn’t follow rules, he’d eat the leftover food off the patients’ trays during rounds, and he drove them nuts.”
Come back with me
to the ruins.