The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is very much a book of its time. It follows in the recent tradition of The Lovely Bones, in which a dead person talks about the afterlife and what all the still-living get wrong in understanding the deceased narrator's history. Not that I'm telling you, dear reader, that if you've read The Lovely Bones then you've read The Penelopiad. On the contrary, besides the device used to rationalize the presence of a main character endowed with eternal hindsight, the two books have nothing in common in terms of plot and language.
Similarly, you may also notice another contrivance present in Atwood's book that has popped up recently in other best selling fiction like Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister: the centrality of the untold story. The main character, Penelope, wife of Odysseus, is characterized as virtuous and loyal while the Wicked Witch of the West and the Ugly Stepsister are seen as evil and conniving in their original roles; however, all three feel maligned by the passing years for never acknowledging their sides of the story. This cosmic error, we readers are to think, is made right by authors like Maguire and Atwood.
The Penelopiad is crafted as a confessional from beyond the grave where the obedient wife finally gets her due. As a result, it is a delicate balance between paralleling and diverging from the traditional Odysseus myth. While the main story, as told by the spirit of Penelope, remains fairly true to the well-worn story line, the main divergence and development comes in the short skits and poems recited by a group of the twelve maids hung for their disobedience to Odysseus. Their interjections as a Greek chorus appear between and among the chapters of Penelope's story and are the most creative and interesting part of the story.
While the narrative and flow of the book is smooth and familiar, the language used to give voice to Penelope is a bit anachronistic. We are told that the dead do often have a chance to observe the modern world and may even choose to live a new life in it, but since Penelope has only lived one life (the one recounted in Atwood's book), one wonders how she was able to learn and accommodate words from languages that didn't exist at her time, or such choice phrases like "T and A." Why would she be able to integrate such slang but be able to refer to steroids in sports in only the vaguest terms?
No matter, these anachronisms are a slight distraction. Ultimately, the story is engaging, the intellectual lifting light, and the book a charming retelling of the epic poem we all had to read at some point in grade school.
