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Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood

Start date: January 1, 2018

Finish date: January 30, 2018

Why we're reading this: Jan 2018 New School
[close] Jan 2018 New School

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Jan 26, 2018 Melanti rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: e-book, library, group-reads, historical, 2018

I normally enjoy Atwood and generally adore unreliable narrators but this one really fell flat for me.

On the unreliable narrator front - I felt the alternative explanations to be laughably implausible. In her inner monologue, Grace is revealed to be someone who is manipulative and catering her story to appeal to her target audience. And, granted, who wouldn't be, at that point. But when the best she can come up with is so silly and sidesteps all personal responsibility? Uh, no. I'm not buying i I normally enjoy Atwood and generally adore unreliable narrators but this one really fell flat for me.

On the unreliable narrator front - I felt the alternative explanations to be laughably implausible. In her inner monologue, Grace is revealed to be someone who is manipulative and catering her story to appeal to her target audience. And, granted, who wouldn't be, at that point. But when the best she can come up with is so silly and sidesteps all personal responsibility? Uh, no. I'm not buying it one bit. And since I don't buy it, it just negates all the appeal an unreliable narrator generally has.

Additionally, I think the feminist angle was far too overdone and intrusive.

For instance, when they surround Kinnear's grave with a white picket fence, and Nancy's with a black - first, that seems rather implausible that they'd bother with black paint, when, IMO, they'd be more likely to just leave it unpainted. But second, readers are capable of drawing our conclusions from that ourselves and we don't need the text to spell out that this is due to double standards with regard to slut shaming. This happens multiple times - including with Mrs. Jordan's letters at the end of the book.

Also, it seemed nearly every man was just an ass wanting to take advantage of women in general, and many of the high placed women were just enablers of the men's despicable behavior. Really, the only decent guy that has more than a minor role in this is Jamie Walsh. But even with him - how would he have noticed Grace's stockings that day? Given the typical dress of that era - near ground length skirts - there wouldn't have been hardly any of her stockings showing. So, either that's made up, or he went out of the way to stare at her ankles - which wasn't exactly proper in that era. It's later excused by the evil lawyers that made him lie in court, but that was the excuse for 99% of the things said in court and it's worn thin by the end of the book. Plus, him (view spoiler)
That's yet another jackass move by a man. And a book filled with nothing but jackass men just doesn't work for me.

While I generally like feminist angles in books, I think this particular one goes way too far and ends up being counter productive. ...more

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