Word: roz
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...Everybody Really Hates Me, by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx (HarperCollins; $14). Adults in Roz Chast's funny-because-they're-not-funn y New Yorker cartoons look like blobby 11-year-olds, so she's a natural to illustrate the stirring tale of Patty Jane, unjustly punished for bopping her little brother. ("I did not hit Theodore. I touched him hard.") To teach the world a lesson, she decides to stay in her room forever. Snit-having Jennifers will recognize a master...
...first glance, you might take this for a fairy tale in which all of the principle roles have been altered to fit women, just to prove that it can be done. That is how Roz, a brassy CEO, and her terrible twins compromise to make their bedtime stories more acceptable. "They opt for women in every role," even if this means making life for these heroines more complex or uncomfortable. For instance, when playing their own version of "The Robber Bridegroom," "they dress their Barbie dolls up [in bridal clothes and] hurl the brides over the stair railings or drown...
Real life in this novel is even more complex, funny and fascinating than its mock fairy-tale frame. Atwood's latest novel involves three college acquaintances' entanglements with evil: Roz, the daughter of successful Jewish immigrants; Tony, a historian of warfare; and Charis, a believer in aura and the virtues of fruit. In telling their stories, Atwood takes a stab at the rationales of many such modern fairy tales, examining contemporary female stereotypes as well as issues of personal and moral responsibility. Her heroines have to fight for what is theirs, and often seem to lose what little they...
...carelessness. This is most notable in her depiction of Charis, and her airy speculations on numerology; Charis relates that seven is "two threes and a one, which [she] prefers because threes are graceful pyramids as well as a goddess number." This characterization, as well as the descriptions of Roz's stereotyped homosexual assistant Bryce, might be crude or dull if it wasn't tempered with a whimsical compassion. Here Atwood's specialty is the grim glee she takes in detailing the disaster that Roz, Tony and Charis invite into their lives along with Zenia...
...story for the fainthearted. If the twins had any say in the matter, they might have insisted unregretfully that in any good story somebody "had to be boiled." But Roz, Tony, and Charis have scars which will take longer to heal, or may be as permanent and insidious as the evil which caused them. It's lucky for them that they have not only each other, but also some good stories to tell. Ironically, it is Zenia who ends up as the unifying thread of their experience. This Robber-Bridegroom, in the shape of a svelte Bluebeard in drag...