Time Arrested

By Stefan Kanfer

CAT'S EYE

by Margaret Atwood

Doubleday; 446 pages; $18.95

The shopper, a woman nearing 50, pauses before a cosmetics counter. "I'd use anything if it worked," she reflects. "Slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip-drip of time, stay more or less the way I am."

And then Elaine Risley moves on. She is poignantly aware that all the rejuvenating creams and unguents in the world are useless against the abrasions of time. Only two devices have ever been known to arrest the years: memory and art. She puts both to use in this quirky, brilliant evocation of a childhood seen from the middle of the journey.

For almost a decade, Margaret Atwood's fellow Canadians have dubbed her the "high priestess of angst." If the title is not exactly flattering, it is not entirely unfair. Most of her previous two dozen volumes of poems and fiction were freighted with allegorical misery: The Edible Woman feels herself cannibalized by family and friends; the paleontologist of Life Before Man views the people around her as potential fossils; in The Handmaid's Tale, a future America goes to hell when it is taken over by religious fundamentalists. But in Cat's Eye, Atwood jettisons her old techniques in favor of recognizable landscapes and more plausible griefs.

Elaine is a painter based in British Columbia, "as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning." Only a retrospective of her works lures her back. But the praise of young feminists seems ignorant or condescending, and the town's gleaming new facades have an even worse effect. "Underneath the flourish and ostentation," she decides, "is the old city . . . malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable. In my dreams of this city I am always lost."

This sense of loss appears and reappears in a series of densely detailed flashbacks. It begins when her father, a field naturalist, abandons the lyrical Canadian woods for a university job. She and her brother exchange a "rootless life of impermanence and safety" for the urban wilderness of conformity and cliques. The boy, a prodigy, retreats into a private world of abstruse science and physics. Elaine seeks acceptance by her peers, a gaggle of victimizing girls led by a meanspirited brat named Cordelia. Atwood understands that no subsequent humiliations can ever cut so deep as those of youth. The cruelties done to the narrator become sources of a melancholia that affects the rest of her days.

Atwood is 49, her father was an entomologist, and she spent her early years in the Canadian woods before moving to Toronto. It would be easy to view this novel as one more thinly fictionalized autobiography. But Cat's Eye is no mere tracing of events. It is concerned, not to say obsessed, with the occurate representation of youthful feelings.

Like her brother, Elaine finds sustenance in a rich inner life. But his is charged with a scientist's theorems; hers is transfigured by a painter's sensibilities. At dinner she thinks, "I'm eating . . . the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can't even fly any more. I am eating lost flight." Snow falls onto skin "like cold moths; the air fills with feathers." On a phonograph record, Frank Sinatra turns into "a disembodied voice, sliding around on the tune like someone slipping on a muddy sidewalk. He slithers up to a note, hits it, flails, recovers, oozes in the direction of another note." In conversations with boyfriends, "the important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we're both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We're looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there." Fallen women seem "women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves."

Elaine's emotional life is effectively over at puberty. Subsequent portraits of the artist show her as a naive and unwise lover of her drawing instructor; as a divorcee whose marriage broke up dispassionately, out of an insuperable numbness; and finally, as a wife and mother attempting to shield her daughters from the headlines screaming of violence and sex. Only in the role of a mother can she confess, "I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one." Even so, it is the 1950s and not the 1980s that inform her responses. Mature affairs are nowhere near so memorable as the early speculations about sex. And Elaine's family members, from her doomed brother to her devoted husband, seem mere walk-ons compared with Elaine's nemesis Cordelia in her roles as the tyrannous child and as a grownup who eventually recedes into insanity.

But these shortcomings never diminish the acuity of the searching Cat's Eye. "No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child," wrote Victor Hugo. Atwood's achievement is the decoding of childhood's secrets, and the creation of a flawed and haunting work of art.