RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/10/02/gilead-resembles-

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood’s 1985 work, The Handmaid’s Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump’s America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood’s saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale to Trump’s ascendancy. She writes: “It’s hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power.”

Michiko Kakutani recently reviewed The Testaments for the New York Times. She writes:

Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves…just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale are already heavily invested with the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States—with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees—will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel…now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet.

At the anti-Trump pro-women’s rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again” and “The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual.”

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

However, Atwood’s Gilead reflects and foretells two other profoundly devastating realities, which neither the critics nor Atwood dwell upon.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/09/an-uncanny-gift-for-prophecy

The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’

There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust. The Dutch get it early and twice from the narrator of Serotonin — ‘a race of opportunist polyglot people’.‘Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best.’ The narrator of Serotonin is a typical creation of the author, which is to say essentially indistinguishable from Michel Houellebecq.

Florent-Claude Labrouste is a man in his late forties whose parents have killed themselves in a suicide pact. He dislikes his name, has no friends, works in the Ministry of Agriculture and hates Paris, where he lives. Mentioning his diesel 4×4 he says: ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’

His girlfriend, for whom he feels nothing but disgust and contempt, is Japanese. He discovers that she has been cheating on him in orgies, though is neither surprised nor even bothered by the extremity of the details. Finally he chooses to leave her, resign from his job, walk out of his rented flat and do something else. ‘Clearing my office took me a little under ten minutes. It was nearly four o’clock; in less than a day I had reconfigured my life.’