The Red Shoes : Margaret Atwood Starting Out

Rating:
Summary: Over-focussed on Atwood's poetry
Review: Despite the author's tedious insistence that this is a "not biography" (when it obviously is a biography), the first half of this book is quite wonderful: a chance to meet the child who grew into the brilliant, steely writer, including some lovely, hilarious anecdotes that shed considerable light on her work.

But, as the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly focussed on Atwood's poetry--page after page is devoted to excerpts and analysis--while her much more widely read novels, the primary reason she is of international interest, are covered with bizarre brevity. Though admittedly not Atwood's finest work, "Lady Oracle," her first major bestseller and a book with obvious autobiographical significance, gets 3/4 of a page. Even Surfacing, a strenuously profound novel and surely worthy of eggheady analysis, gets short shrift.

This imbalance undermines the book's value, and while The Red Shoes is a must for any serious Atwood fan, prepare to be frustrated.

Rating:
Summary: haunting biography consumes
Review: i am currently reading 'the shadow maker' again, and i'm even more consumed than the first time. i'd like to take this opportunity to tell potential readers/buyers that this book is NOT out of print...

Rating:
Summary: Factual errors raise suspicion of unreliability
Review: This biography is wholly interesting, particularly in its account of the early days of the Anansi Press and the activities of such people as Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje, Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood herself in creating a new hospitable environment for Canadian writing. But its lapses are considerable and it betrays the signs of haste and of deficient editing. The "red shoes" conceit - an extensively belaboured allusion to the 1940s Moira Shearer movie about a ballerina who discovers that in that era it was not possible to be both an artist and a wife -- might have been marginally insightful as a passing reference. But as the title of the book and as a recurrent image it is after a time irritating in its inappropriateness to Margaret Atwood's life. The biography itself (albeit that Ms Sullivan protests that it is a "not biography") extensively demonstrates what Atwood herself has frequently noted: that the knowledge of the Northern bush which frequently enters her fiction, the practicality and down-to-earth matter-of-factness of both her prose and the persona she presents in interviews and public appearances are grounded in a childhood wholly different from conventional 1940s little-girldom.
Moreover, the text is replete with relatively trivial factual errors which after a time become disturbing, for they raise the suspicion that Ms Sullivan is not to be trusted as to matters of real significance. In particular one notes that the lapses mostly have to do with matters of common knowledge to the ordinarily literate Canadian: what knowledge of Canadian circumstances, then, does Ms Sullivan bring to the task, and given the preoccupations of her subject Margaret Atwood, was Ms Sullivan the most appropriate author to undertake it?
And given that she did undertake it, surely more knowledgeable editors can be found in the Canadian publishing industry who could catch such lapses as these examples (pagination referring to the HarperCollins paperback edition of 1998):

Page 89 "[Northrop Frye]" had the look of the lay United Church preacher he moonlighted as on weekends." But it is well known that Frye was not a "lay preacher" but an ordained clergyman in the old, though unusual in Canada, tradition of clerical dons. Given that Ms Sullivan is a professor of English at the same university as Frye this lapse is especially puzzling.
Page 177 "Ordinary women were boring, shackled in domestic virtue as the 'Angel in the House.' (Margaret had picked up Virginia Woolf's phrase long before it gained common currency.")" But it is not Virginia Woolf's phrase; it is Coventry Patmore's, though Virginia Woolf was possibly the first to identify the virtue in the Victorian poem as suspect.
Page 183-4 "Directly across the street was a brick wall....This would become the wall where the executions occurred in The Handmaid's Tale." Well, we've already been told this; one would have thought that either one of the statements of this fact should have been deleted or that some acknowledgement of the repetition ("as has been noted," say) have been made so as to allay the reader's feeling that (to be kind) Ms Sullivan's proofreaders were lying down on the job.
Page 182 "Its steps were flanked by white pseudo-Corinthian columns,...." This seems an odd qualification: surely either they were Corinthian columns or they were not: the suggestion of faded ersatz elegance is not bolstered by the word "pseudo" and Corinthian columns are not only to be found on actual classical ruins.
Page 188 "Mr Atwood was floored by the ceremony...." - but elsewhere in the text Margaret Atwood's father is referred to as "Dr Atwood," and the inconsistency, while hardly a major flaw, is mildly irritating and adds to one's impression of general sloppiness of execution.
Page 204 "[John Glassco] had not yet published his famous fictional autobiography, Memoirs of Montparnasse." Well, was it fictional? There was nothing in the reviews at the time of its publication to indicate that it was fabricated; if subsequent literary discussion has revealed otherwise then surely Ms Sullivan should have provided at least a footnote to this effect.
Page 234 "Charlie had gotten a job teaching at the University of Calgary the previous fall," ie, presumably, in 1968, when there was no University of Calgary, but rather a University of Alberta, Calgary campus.
Page 242 Margaret Laurence, from Manitoba, and Jim Polk, Atwood's first husband, "could talk about the small Midwestern towns they had come from" -- but he was from Montana and that is most certainly not the "Midwest," at least not in US terminology, though arguably Manitoba is.
Page 212 "The FLQ ...[i]n 1963 had placed their first bombs in mail boxes and public buildings." Well no, the FLQ did not exist in 1963; it was the RIN.
Page 274 The people of Mulmur Township "still spoke in an Irish/English idiom that had survived from the nineteenth century....When they referred to slightly demented people they used the expression 'two bricks short of a load""-as though this cliché were not well known outside rustic Ontario, and indeed common throughout the English-speaking world, though possibly not so well known among University of Toronto academics.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful analysis of the life and times of a young Atwood
Review: This intriguing book tells about the early life of Margaret Atwood in great detail, and then skims through the last couple of decades. Rosemary Sullivan has done a remarkable job of recreating the '40's, '50's, '60's and '70's, and how they influenced (and eventually were influenced by!) Canada's #1 writer. Having interviewed Atwood, many of her friends and associates, ex-husband and present husband, and also using contemporary correspondence, Sullivan seems to have an authentic understanding of how Atwood developed into such an amazing, prolific writer. Always respectful, Sullivan keeps her focus on what in Atwood's life is relevant to her as a writer. This is a very intelligently written biography, with an incredible amount of research and very astute analyses, and should be a satisfying read for any fan of Margaret Atwood's, without feeling like you have invaded her privacy.