Motley with Method

By Le Anne Schreiber

LADY ORACLE

by MARGARET ATWOOD

345 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Alice in Wonderland is alive and well and living in Margaret Atwood's new novel. She has changed a bit: she operates under the alias Joan Foster, resides in Toronto and writes gothic romances on the sly. But she still has more identities than she knows how to handle, takes pills that make her undergo disconcerting changes of size, and gets into trouble by gazing too long into a looking glass.

Most of the time, Joan Foster is the quietly unremarkable wife of a humorless student radical. In odd stolen hours, she plays mistress to an avant-garde artist who serves as a kind of latter-day Mad Hatter. From both husband and lover, Joan cleverly hides two secret shames: the fact that she produces feverishly romantic gothic novels and her pre-diet-pill memories of a miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing while staring at herself in a three-way mirror, she turns out a surreal prose poem called Lady Oracle that becomes a bestseller. Sudden celebrity as the author of Lady Oracle --which publishers promote as an irresistible blend of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran--brings a blackmailer into Joan's life. Rather than face exposure of her multiple lives, Joan plans a fake accidental death by drowning. Thereafter, she hopes to resurface in a new life --one that will be "neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or a basic black dress with a single strand of pearls."

The escape works for a while and she gets to Italy, but her life stubbornly continues "to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror." Significantly, the same might be said of Margaret Atwood's writing in Lady Oracle. The novel does not develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself -- letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare.

Crooked Seams. After writing Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood, like Joan, may have wondered whether she "should have taken it to a psychiatrist instead of a publisher." Fortunately, she did not. For if Atwood's last novel, Surfacing, was her basic black dress of a novel -- trim, taut and meticulously crafted -- then Lady Oracle is successful motley, a striking work made out of bright patches with all the crooked seams showing.

Despite her oddities, Joan Foster becomes a character who genuinely engages the reader's sympathy and suggests that within every classically shaped woman there may be a ballooning romantic waiting to get out. She is also a useful vehicle for a meditation on the possibilities of modern fiction. In unobtrusive layers of allusion, Atwood pays homage to earlier forms of the novel -- the picaresque, the gothic romance, the Bildungsroman and Victorian saga. She tries to shoehorn her heroine's life into the coherent contours of those forms, but Joan Foster won't sit still for the fitting. Even the baggiest literary shapes require a greater certainty about life than heroine -- or author -- can muster. "It did make a mess," says Joan Foster as she sums up her life at the end of Lady Oracle. But if more tidy, it might be less true.

Le Anne Schreiber

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.