Word: childless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sexes Atwood's theme is the breakdown of human communication, where men and women address each other like creatures from different planets. Atwood's characters bitterly avoid human contact, as if under some delusion of strength in solitude and weakness in numbers. This is the generation of impermanence--of childless marriages and unmarried couples who "live together" out of inertia. The threat of nuclear war hangs over them perennially. The men and women in Dancing Girls respond not to each other, but only to their inward selves and how they might profit from someone else. In one story...
...believe, 40 orphan cats. The number keeps changing, but always the house seethes with prowling felines. They have taken over couches, chairs, beds, sinks and tubs. They perch on the stairway, roost on the bookcase, snooze in the laundry basket. They also occupy the dining room table, and the childless Milsters no longer eat there. Litter pans crowd the walls, the halls and the corners. Food and water bowls are set out in odd places. Cats suffering from infectious diseases inhabit the kitchen. A dozen of the menagerie are cripples, three are one-eyed, one is a dwarf...
...there is obviously good breeding and a bit of money in their backgrounds. But the isolation of old age is upon them. No close friends are left on the pond; their only child Chelsea has been estranged from her father since childhood and now almost never comes home. Divorced, childless, she is living the worrisome ad hoc life of the fortyish woman who is still trying to find herself. The promise of a visit from her before the summer ends does not cheer Norman...
...1970s, the baby-boom children were "singles," the glamour class of childless sybarites that had responsibilities to no one other than themselves. A decade later, they are dropping anchor. Harvard Demographer George Masnick foresees them aspiring "to put down roots, to plant gardens, to rake the leaves." Already, says he, "young men and women are moving to the country in droves, trying to get away from the singles bars, the single apartment complexes...
...provides a Dostoyevskian cast of | characters: William Kirwill, a renegade Catholic policeman visiting Moscow to find the murderer of his radical brother; Andreev, a dwarf who can sculpt personalities out of carrion; Zoya, the gymnast, Arkady's humorless wife who parrots jawbreaking propaganda ("So it is shown that childless or one-child families, superficially suitable to working parents in the urban centers of European Russia, are not in the greater interest of society if we starve the future of Russian leaders"); Major Pribluda, a farm boy turned KGB thug who knows more about the seasons of the soil than...