Fair warning that every review has the potential of significant spoilers.
★★★★
This is a portrait of modern society, painted as a dystopia. What happens when people aren’t happy, and why? Margaret plops a poor couple smack into what is supposedly the happiest decade of American history. Be happy! Fake it til you make it! Charmaine(the Charm) and Stan(the Bland) are perfectly malleable. So they are scooped up by Jocelyn(The Jostler) and Con(the Con!) and are puppeted to do precisely whatever it was that was needed. They are the “bread and circus.” I am actually more fascinated with their story. We can only hope there’s a spin-off.
Charmaine doesn’t seem to have a thought in her head so this is especially easy for her. Atwood even throws in a parallel to our current culture: Grandma Win(as in YOU WIN! Self congratulations! FTW! The names are quite hilarious. Obvious and perfect.) Grandma Win is supposedly Charmaine’s grandmother that is now deceased, but she has all these cheesy catchphrases that Charmaine thinks are helpful, but are really just … bullshit. Basically, “Grandma Win” is that facebook Aunt that constantly posts memes with mantras and inspirational quotes, but never visits and generally doesn’t give a hoot about anything but her own inner-world.
If you know what it is like to live without a backup plan and without any relatives to help you out-you will be able to relate to Stan and Charmaine. Yet, even they have one relative. Con, Stan’s brother. Unreliable. Probably dangerous. In the end Stan and Charm are in Vegas and it didn’t prove entirely difficult for Stan to get a job-that apparently supports a family of three in an actual home. The reason this is a dystopia is because nowadays, if they had $200 and a car, they’d buy a case of ramen noodles and some water and drive to Vegas. They fear this because the journey is likely a murderous wasteland. So, they try the Consilience/Positron Project. Both choices potentially build character. Which builds more? I think more murdering happened within the project than what might have happened had they chanced the drive to Vegas.
I felt that Margaret was pointing out that most of us have enough to meagerly situate ourselves in another city. If not: prison, and we all know how corrupt those are. Do our problems go away when we finally arrive in “Vegas?” Does Charmaine stop wanting to cheat on her husband? Does stan start caring about Charmaine beyond trying out cliche voyeuristic water sex? No. Happy people are so much more complicated, and intelligent. Reading. Drawing. Writing. Fixing. Doing. Changing. Not perseverating on each other, but on their own interests. Had Lester Burnham gotten into some kind of activism or hobby or anything, there’d be zero premise for the movie American Beauty. Atwood is taking a stab at the one dimensional unfulfilling lives people try so hard to attain. After you’ve gotten married, bought the house, had the kid: then what? It’s a special kind of complacency(see above: “happiest decade of American history”) that probably will lead to a dystopian world like Stan and Charmaine’s. Where you get bored and buy robot sex dolls or take vacations in Vegas to gamble your dollars away-doing nothing to actually HELP the Stan and Charmaine’s who’re living in their cars fighting off predators. Just being. And ignoring. Then, Stan and Charmaine come full circle and presumably do the same. Charmaine preoccupied with the dryer, Stan the lawn. Probably planning baby’s first Disney vacation, who is named, of course Winnie, after Grandma Win.
I have to hand it to Atwood: writing about boring people was likely difficult-especially in a way that doesn’t entirely offend everyone.