I’ve been thinking that Blue Movie and Surfacing are about as different from one another as two novels can be, given that they were published at around the same time and in the same linguistic and cultural milieu. Blue Movie is straight ahead action with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The action is described in detail, the dialog is hilarious and direct, the meaning of it all is never in doubt, and the only time that really matters is the time right now. In the world of Surfacing, the action of the present is always being disrupted by the intrusion of memories and analysis of the past; the words of dialog are ambiguous and rarely sufficient; the meaning of it all is always in doubt. Southern gives us characters who are grossly insensitive; Atwood gives us a character who is sensitive to an awful lot, who perhaps sees far too much of the meaning of the world. As Atwood’s narrator says early on in the novel: “here everything echoes.”
Those three words come on page 47 of my copy, a four by seven inch Popular Library paperback from 1972, an interesting artifact. Across the top of the front cover the publisher’s blurb reads: “The most shattering novel a woman ever wrote–” The author’s name is in purple and the title is bright orangey red. A small, dark photo shows a man and woman stroking each other’s necks and about to touch lips. The man is slightly lower than the woman; he also fades more into the dark background. Both appear to have their eyes closed. At the bottom of the cover is a quote from the New York Times: “Even better than The Bell Jar…Vivid and gripping!”
If you open the book, the first thing you see is a page whereon the publishers have excerpted two short paragraphs from the book, one of them the only overtly sexual passage in the novel and the other relating to childbirth. Next come two pages of critical praise. Only after these does the title page appear. On the back cover are more quotes from contemporary reviewers. Here’s a sampling of the review excerpts. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Shatteringly effective…deeply moving and original.” From the Denver Post: “A woman’s novel equal to James Dickey’s Deliverance.” From the Boston Globe: “The author has created in her heroine a person for survival; a new breed of woman, ‘a new kind of centerfold’.”
Clearly a number of critics really liked Surfacing. Just as clearly, the contemporary cultural current really wanted to foreground the fact that the author was a woman. The publisher is the least subtle: “The most shattering novel a woman ever wrote.” (Nowhere in my research have I come across anyone describing Blue Movie as “The dirtiest and funniest novel a man ever wrote.”) The NYT is a little more subtle. The phrase “Even better than The Bell Jar” is just about perfect, praise that seems sincere but also educated, praise that places Atwood’s novel firmly in its niche. Some of the other reviewers seem to have been struggling a bit. In regard to the Denver Post, does the phrase “a woman’s novel” actually mean? And why compare Surfacing to Deliverance? Because they both have canoes? And that Boston Globe reviewer! The tagline I quoted above is very close to gibberish. But it gets its message across anyway, doesn’t it? It manages to suggest that what is important here the revelatory quality, a woman character who tells us what she really thinks about men and possibly even about having sex with them. The reference to “a new kind of centerfold” is flat out bizarre, but it hints at a chance to look at the forbidden, the monster we don’t talk about, a being who would rather survive as herself than sacrifice herself to please others. Wild times, those 70’s.
Anyway, as far as those critics’ blurbs go, I’m happiest with Cleveland. Surfacing is “effective” and “deeply moving” for sure. When Atwood shows us how the narrator’s deepest structural foundations begin to fall away, I could feel mine slipping too. It’s scary. We’re running parallel to part of Pynchon’s universe here; and we’re falling through the membrane. And when it comes to watching the membrane tear, Atwood is way more convincing.
Her later novels are better known than Surfacing and they are wonderful stories, deep and strong; but for me Surfacing is special. I was young when I first read it, twenty-six or twenty-seven. I will always associate it with my life at that time and with the woman who first told me about it. I might even say that this novel changed my life, that I learned something from it–not very much, I’m afraid, not as much as I should have learned, but a little. And for that little I must be grateful.