In "The Tent," the title story of Margaret Atwood's new collection, a writer frantically covers the walls of her paper tent with writing, trying to keep the danger of the outside wilderness from penetrating her fragile home. It is easy to imagine that writing born of such all-encompassing desperation might be just as chaotic, inexorable, and eclectic as The Tent, a not-quite-sturdy paper structure holding the records of a lone, brilliant voice observing the wilderness of the modern world.

There are 35 bite-sized pieces in this book, mostly prose, some poetry, all marked by the stylistic grace and pithy irreverence typical of their author. Many skewer various aspects of culture, from the simplistic, quixotic zeal of preservationists to the blundering attempts at understanding history in a post-colonial society. These are the bulk of the book, and combine a zesty perspicacity with often obscure, even impenetrable experiments in style and expression. Most of the pieces in the collection defy easy description or categorization, and often defy and dismantle the expectation of a narrative structure.

A number of the pieces that take on the abstract issues of society's foibles might, in less capable hands, be accused—not untruthfully—of triteness. In a story about heaven, for example, human souls are punished by becoming bait and prey for the souls of cats who were good on Earth, and a fairly unsophisticated point is made about the mistreatment of cats in the present world. However, Atwood treats each subject with acerbic humor and an ironic eccentricity of perspective that renew and reinvigorate the oldest of myths and the most familiar of the everyday. One of the highlights of the collection, "Bring Back Mom: An Invocation," is a lyrical elegy for the lost dream of the perfect mother/housewife. The topic is simple, almost obvious, but the execution is so graceful that the poem feels like a revelation.

To dip into this collection is to witness the power of a good writer to keep the threatening world momentarily at bay, but also to hear the cry of impotence that lurks in any attempt at verbal expression. If many of the pieces turn outwards to the world, many others turn inwards on themselves, questioning and unraveling the concept of writing. In the very first piece of the collection, Atwood explores the idea of a memoir, distilling the very essence of any "Life Story" to the single concept of a self, an I. Another piece describes a "Voice" that usurps the personhood of the narrator, and shrugs off body and mind to take over identity. Is writing the expression of a self, or merely the farcical illusion of a Voice? And in the climactic expression of this disillusionment, "The Animals Reject Their Names," all the animals of the world rebel against human definitions of them, propelling the story of the world backwards through history.

The Tent can show us the power of a voice to expose an old human truth in a new way, and uses the power of that voice to explore what it means to be a writer—what it means, indeed, to be human with a human storytelling instinct.

These morsels are best enjoyed in moderation, for sitting through this entire book at once would cause vertigo in even the most stout-hearted of readers. The sprawling breadth of Atwood's vision of the world is nothing short of overwhelming. The book lacks, not depth, but leisure to explore that depth; upon crystallizing one insight into polished perfection, it immediately moves on to another piece. The hectic variety is playful, exhilarating, and fast enough for a modernity that prefers sound-bytes to operas.

Skilled and sagacious though they may be, these bits and pieces of a writer's vision don't quite add up to a whole. There is a certain hollowness at the center of the collection, a superficiality, that lingers despite the undeniable fascination of the spell woven by Atwood's eloquence. These pieces often seem indeed to be the hallucinatory writings of a madwoman in a tent, and this image can shed light on what might be missing from The Tent as a whole: a center of balance on which to rest a slim book carrying a dozen times its weight in ideas.

What is a voice? Why do we need stories? Where lies Margaret Atwood the author in a collection of pieces that begins by dismantling the concept of the life-story? A writer for whom reality is always polyphonic and multifaceted, the creator of this lovely collection may have left those questions unanswered, but the beleaguered voice calls like a siren, and beckons us to follow its idiosyncratic gaze as it explores the impenetrable forest of the world.

 

Kristen Tracey will scribble in any dwelling place.