Alternate Personalities Atwood Expands Writing Talents With New Novel ‘Alias Grace’

When Margaret Atwood was in Zurich several years ago on a book-promotion tour, she had a sudden, inexplicable visitation.

Looking out a window of her hotel, she thought about Grace Marks, who, in 1843 at the age of 16, was convicted of murdering her employer and his mistress. This was one of Canada’s most famous criminal cases. For the author it became something of an obsession, and in 1974 she wrote a television play about Grace, based on the premise that she was guilty.

Now she had an image of Grace in the cellar of the Canadian farmhouse - the scene of the killings. Inspired, she sat down and began writing a novel on the hotel stationery. Almost immediately, she found herself in a cul de sac and had serious doubts about continuing.

“I’m not Mr. Trollope,” she said during a recent visit to New York City. “Nothing is predictable in my work. There is no grand scheme.”

The problem, she realized, was that she was writing the book in the third person, and it was “the wrong gear.” Switching to the first person, Grace herself, she broke through into the story. Eventually the novel, “Alias Grace,” moved among several voices, including an American doctor who uses pre-Freudian analysis to explore Grace’s emotional state at the time of the murders.

This is Atwood’s ninth novel and first work of historical fiction (unless her futuristic dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” could be considered in that category). With the newly published “Alias Grace” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), she scrupulously holds to the facts as she discovered them in her research, and then, with a novelist’s eye, she imagines dazzling twists and turns.

Although she was careful to avoid anachronisms, she does not think of it as a 19th-century novel: “It was Robertson Davies who said that we can’t help but be contemporary, no matter when we set our books.”

“Alias Grace” was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the third time she was so honored. When she and Beryl Bainbridge lost to Graham Swift, she told Bainbridge: “He won the prize. You have the oeuvre.” The same thing, of course, could be said about Atwood.

Though most of her work is rooted in the Canadian landscape, it is the opposite of insular. With dry, ironic wit, a poetic sensibility and more than a hint of the Gothic, she has uncompromisingly observed the psychology of the people in her society. Books like “Surfacing,” “Cat’s Eye” and “The Robber Bride” are not easily identifiable by the gender of the author.

Her female characters are victims and victimizers; some are the essence of evil, like Zenia in “The Robber Bride.” And what about Grace? Innocent on the outside, she may have disguised a bitterly vengeful streak. In her prismatic novel, Atwood refuses to say whether Grace was guilty but artfully considers diverse possibilities, including the notion that she may have been playacting.

The title “Alias Grace” refers to when the protagonist assumes the character of her best friend. The idea of alternate personalities pervades Atwood’s work and her life. She was named Margaret after her mother but, to avoid confusion, has always been called Peggy, which she considers a frivolous name.

“I have a frivolous side,” she admitted. “But you notice which name I used for writing. In a way I had an alternate personality in reserve.” For a time, she thought about using her initials M.A. Atwood as her writing name. (The copyrights to her books are in the name O.W. Toad, an anagram of Atwood.)

Her father was an entomologist who took his family on annual trips to the wilds of Canada’s bush country, which furnished the author with her feeling for the more primal aspects of life, so endemic to her work. Before she was 6, she wrote poetry, then switched to painting. It was not until she was 16 that she wrote again.

She acknowledged the accuracy of a teacher’s assessment (in a documentary about Atwood’s life) that as a schoolgirl she showed “no particular promise.” But she never stopped reading. As she listed her girlhood favorites (“Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” “Sherlock Holmes,” Poe, Stevenson, comic books), they duplicated those of the average young boy, until she reached Jane Austen, her first strong female influence, and then she went on to Faulkner and Melville.

At 21 she began her career by printing 200 copies of her first book of poetry and selling them for 50 cents each. (That book now sells for as much as $1,800 at book fairs.)

When she started, she said, there was no great tradition of Canadian writing, with few exceptions, like Mavis Gallant, who left the country, and Davies. During one year in the early 1960s, “only five Canadian novels were published,” she said, and the country was considered “a kind of hopeless cultural backwater.”

The atmosphere was even more hostile to men than to women writers. Writing was regarded as sissyish. “Women did flower embroidering, interior decoration and poetry, woman-type things,” Atwood said. “If you found writers at all, and there was a small cultural community, there were good women writers among them.”

In contrast to the United States, “I didn’t feel all these genius men hanging over me,” she said. “Canada was a wide open prairie.” It is now richly populated by Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields and Atwood, among many others.

The critic Northrop Frye was one of her mentors. And when he died, Atwood said, “he did not lock literature into an ivory tower; instead he emphasized its centrality to the development of a civilized and humane society.”

She cherishes her wide international readership. “If we only write books for people writing academic papers, it would be a futile exercise,” she said.

Still, books and theses are continually being written about her work. She remains distant. “Self-definition,” she has said, “is a kind of prison.”

In the absence of her own analysis, others have leaped to description. At various times she has been called Medusa-like, the Queen Bee of Canadian literature and a black-magic witch. Actually, there is a witch in her family’s closet: Mary Webster, who was condemned in Connecticut before the time of the Salem trials.

Atwood thinks journalistic name-calling has ceased as she has become older (she is now 57), but she is still nagged by the Medusa label. “They wouldn’t have been able to say that if I had been a snub-nosed blonde,” she said. She has thick, brown curly hair and is petite rather than threatening.

Atwood continues to draw the curtain on her private life. She has lived in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson for many years, and they have a daughter who is in college. Steadfastly, she refuses to allow journalists to enter her house. “They would review the furniture,” she said, “and some of it is Graeme’s grandfather’s furniture. I don’t want my personality coming out like Graeme’s grandfather.”

With hesitation, she spoke about her ability to assume other roles. For years she and a friend staged puppet shows, in which she played many characters. Illustrating the range of puppet possibilities, she raised her voice to a falsetto, and said, “You can be Little Red Ridinghood.” Then a wicked smile crossed her face, as she lowered her voice to a growl, and said, “And you can also be the wolf.” She added, “Why limit oneself to one voice?”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MORE ABOUT ‘ALIAS GRACE’ Here’s what the critics say about “Alias Grace” by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday, $24.95, 468 pp.): Kyrie O’Connor/The Hartford Courant: Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace” is a great work of fiction and/or the screenplay for the next movie for Claire Danes. Or maybe Winona Ryder. Or even Julia Roberts. There’s something about this novel, Atwood’s ninth, that’s both literary and movie-worthy, that makes you want to cast it even as you turn the pages. It’s a pretty irresistible story. … Predicting popularity of novels in the late 20th century is about as reliable as phrenology. But this book - part lurid page-turner, part woman-centered story, part old-fashioned mystery, part pure literature - has so many potential audiences, it’s hard to see how it could miss finding several of them. Just tell me Demi Moore hasn’t bought the film rights. Chris Ledbetter/Detroit Free Press: Margaret Atwood writes like Bach composed. The distinguished Canadian author of more than 25 books, including “The Robber Bride” and “Cat’s Eye,” tirelessly explores different ways to present her themes so that each new work is just that, new. While Atwood transported us to the future with “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she takes us on a journey to the past with “Alias Grace.” What distinguishes Atwood is not only her brilliant storytelling, but also her lyrical descriptive gifts. She is Hawthorne-like when observing nature: “Cesspool vapours rise from back yards and gutters, and a mist of mosquitoes condenses around every pedestrian’s head. At noon the air shimmers like the space above a heated griddle, and the lake glares, its margin stinking faintly of dead fish and frog spawn.” Gail Caldwell/The Boston Globe: Part of Margaret Atwood’s allure as a storyteller is her talent for building high-rise dramas out of the ordinary detritus of life: a tragedy in a fruit cellar, say, or the promise of reunion in the fragrance of a good roasted chicken. Even within the luminescent sweep of her larger novels, she captures that scope within the sweet minutiae of a particular image. … Beautifully rendering her main character’s voice, Atwood relies upon mystery, divine or otherwise, to embroider and enhance her domestic-tale-gone-awry.