The Next Creation Story, Perhaps

I discovered Margaret Atwood not long after she’d won the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin (2000), got hooked, and began reading her backwards: Alias Grace (1996), The Robber Bride (1993), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), all the way back to The Edible Woman (1969). I sense a shift with The Handmaid’s Tale, into what some might call her literary maturity, coinciding with her middle age. After the shift, she began pushing her literary boundaries. Each subsequent novel is different. Each is engaged with a bigger picture: where we came from, what we’re doing now, where we might be heading, what might happen if we’re not careful, and, with MaddAddam (2013), what might happen after that. She keeps going. She’s unpredictable.

There are always surprises. In The Blind Assassin, for example, the elder protagonist Iris—the muscle controlling the eye; the messenger of the gods—chose “between classicism and romanticism” in her youth, preferring “to be…