Book Review: Margaret Atwood's "The Heart Goes Last"

Margaret Atwood has great ideas, including the premise of The Heart Goes Last: people desperately struggle to survive in a depressed society so much that they’ll voluntarily join Positron – a society where they are free to live in luxury. But there’s a catch. You live in comfort for six months of the year, but for the other six months you labor in prison. You share a house with other people you never see but you know are there (their belongings are stored in lockers in the garage). Of course, things get complicated rather quickly - it’s a tale of the dystopia behind a utopia. This being Atwood, we also get these powerful internal monologs that so deftly reveal the dramatic mental narratives and mythologies that we all build up in our heads.

The best part of the book was how she painted the slow evolution of the stories and self-deceptions of Stan and Charmaine, a Positron couple. Atwood shows how they are their own worst enemy. Given a ticket into what they think is a perfect world, Stan and Charmaine immediately start to subvert it, allowing the boredom and lust of their inner narratives to drive them to betray not only their socially confined borders – but also each other. The first half of the book Atwood masterfully shows us the deep power of social norms and how sexual fetishes – fuel for excitingly illicit transgressions – can be used for both freedom and entrapment. (Ying and Yang!) A scarily vivid picture emerges of a totalitarian world where the couple, isolated from each other, become pawns in shadowy conspiracies that are stranger than they ever could have imagined.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. About halfway through, the plot devolves into absurdity, with (even more) convoluted conspiracies, brainwashing, and inexplicable coincidences. Once Stan [spoiler alert!] escaped Positron disguised as Elvis, I decided the book had become a parody and blissfully enjoyed it as such. That’s Atwood’s prerogative, although I found myself wanting a more serious engagement with bionic sex fetishes, Pavolian sexual conditioning, and economic desperation used as a profit machine. She started THGL as a short story, and perhaps it should have stayed as such, for while the start of the novel is riveting, and I enjoyed it overall, the entire experience wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been.