Devote 10 minutes to Margaret Atwood's meta-fiction

I haven’t read the Canadian great Margaret Atwood since I was in college. And I’ve been meaning to get back to her writing for a long time.

The Handmaid’s Tale from 1982 is first and foremost on my list of Atwood reading priorities - both the TV version and the book. But for now, I took a look at one of my old college English literature textbooks and found a short story titled "Happy Endings" by Atwood. I sat down and read it and thought it was so brilliant that I re-read most of it a couple of different times to family members visiting in town.

The story starts off: “John and Mary meet. What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A.”

From there, Atwood gives different scenarios A through F. John and Mary have a picture perfect - or at least what many of us imagine to be the picture perfect life. But things start to deviate starting with scenario B. Mary is in love with John but John isn't in love with Mary. John only sees Mary at her house when she makes dinner for him. Her friends say that John is a creep and has been seeing eating out with someone named Madge. Mary ends up killing herself and John marries Madge, and they’re happy.

In C, John is an older married man who is in love with Mary but Mary is just having an affair with him and is in love with her boyfriend, who is her own age and who has a great record collection and likes motorcycles. John finds Mary with her boyfriend and shoot them both and then himself. His wife, Madge, eventually finds someone named Fred who she lives happily ever after with.

In D, Fred and Madge are in love but a tidal wave wipes out their neighborhood and a lot of people die, but they escape to live happily. In E, Fred dies of a heart attack and Madge carries out lots of charity work afterwards. In F and the end of the short story, Atwood seems to be saying that all stories have the same ending and that the important thing is how the stories get to those endings.

5 out of 5 stars. Everyone should spend 10 minutes of their lives reading this. And if you want to go deeper in analyzes the scenarios, check this out.

The good old days in Virginia apparently weren't so good (according to Mislaid)

Nell Zink's Mislaid begins as a promising examination of what life might have been like in 1960s to 1980s Virginia, but when the main character and her daughter suddenly decide to become blonde black people, it tailspins into a mess of a second half.

It peters out with no satisfying conclusion, which is a shame, because many vignettes within the thankfully pretty short novel are page turning, intriguing, and laced with smart literary references.

The story starts off in the 1960s at Stillwater College in Centerville, Virginia, where student Meg meets poet teacher Lee. They have a baby and get married and separated several years later. She runs off with their daughter and leaves him with their son. She then changes her daughter's identity from white to black, with not a lot of really clear explanation as to why. Years later they finally meet again through a chance encounter that involves their son's drug bust at the University of Virginia.

Zink gives us very little reason to care about any of the unlikeable characters and there's really nothing profound within the tricks she tries to pull regarding race, sex, and class.

The first chapter of Mislaid appeared in The New Yorker and certainly played a role in getting many people to want to read this one. But really, besides the editors at that magazine, Zink's fanbase mostly consists of Jonathan Franzen, who "discovered" her. I should have known not to read this book based on that information because I really don't want to like (even if I frequently have) Franzen's intellectually stuffed writing either.

My favorite thing about the book, actually, is the excellent mid-century, Archie Andrews/Mad Men-like artwork.

2.5 out of 5 stars