Book Talk: Atwood, ‘The Heart Goes Last’

Having read and been horrified by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, I was disappointed by The Heart Goes Last (2015, 380 pages in softcover format). Perhaps my review is biased by my own experience when I was a child. My family was poor, living paycheck to almost paycheck. By that I mean that the money often ran out before the next paycheck came in. So, we’d charge our food at the local grocery store for a day or two until Dad got home with the current week’s wages. On Saturdays, I’d be sent to the store to pay our bill. Like most families that lived in our circumstances, we shopped daily because our apartment refrigerator was too small to store very much perishable food. But we always had food and a home.

So, I had a hard time understanding the circumstances experienced by Stan and Charmaine, the main characters in this book. And I was equally confounded by the decision that they made.

They’re living in Stan’s car because they’ve lost everything in some unexplained “financial-crash business-wrecking” catastrophe. They are urban foragers, searching for scraps of food, always hungry, and living in fear of roving rapists and other criminals. Then Charmaine learns about a possible solution, called the Positron Project, that offers a house and job to those who are chosen to participate.