Marital Blahs

By Paul Gray

LIFE BEFORE MAN

by Margaret Atwood

Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $11.95

Can someone shout "Marriage breakup!" in a crowded theater and still be protected by the First Amendment? So exhaustively has the subject of matrimonial misery been trotted out in the arts, on TV, at cocktail parties or during chance encounters on street corners that some sort of censorship begins to seem the lesser of two evils: persons found guilty of discussing their relationships within earshot of innocent bystanders will be remanded to a private cell and forced to read Anna Karenina. At the very least, novels adding still more sad husbands and unhappy wives to the present surplus should be viewed with suspicion; their authors are either foolish or audacious.

Canadian Novelist Margaret Atwood, as it happens, takes risks and wins. In Life Before Man she courts banality, presenting three commonplace characters and arranging them in the usual triangle. Out of this hackneyed shape, she produces some uncommonly sharp lines and acute angles. The pain her self-regarding people feel is real and strikes them as unique, but the acts they perform are comically mannered burlesque.

Nate and Elizabeth Schoenhof's marriage of ten years is so open that it has become vacant. She is dominant and ever more restless with the man she married --easily, like trying on a shoe." He is well-meaning to several faults, loves his two young daughters and thinks of himself as "a lump of putty, helplessly molded by the relentless demands and flinty disapprovals of the women he can't help being involved with." Newlyweds of the mid-'60s, they are stranded a decade later on shoals of outworn modishness. They condone each other's affairs and discuss them relentlessly, although Elizabeth takes care "never to divulge her lovers until she was ready to give them up." The problem is that her most recently discarded conquest has failed to play by the Schoenhof rules. He has committed a messy suicide.

This act drives Nate into the arms of Lesje, a timid paleontologist at Toronto's natural history museum. She spends much of her time cultivating the long view of life: "On her office wall the tree of evolution branches like coral towards the ceiling: Fishes, Amphibians, Therapsids, Thecodonts, Archosaurs, Pterosaurs, Birds, Mammals and Man, a mere dot." Nevertheless, she finds herself in love with the dot named Nate and thus at war with Elizabeth over who will get to keep him. Lesje does not have an easy time with either of them: "Sometimes she thinks Nate is an obscure practical joke being played on her by Elizabeth, for an unfathomable reason of her own."

Such moments redeem a routine tale. Atwood does not mock her characters' sufferings, but neither does she exalt them. She also gives Elizabeth, Nate and Lesje small insights into the absurdity of their behavior. To "create some balance in the universe," Elizabeth decides to seduce Lesje's former boyfriend. She succeeds, as usual, but wonders why she bothered: "It was like sleeping with a large and fairly active slab of Philadelphia cream cheese." It is hard not to like Elizabeth and her antagonists, even though most of what they do and think qualifies them for a good throttling. --Paul Gray

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