The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends.

Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men.

But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.

• ISBN10: 0385491034
• ISBN13: 9780385491037
• Publish Date: 20 January 1998 (first published 1 October 1993)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Imprint: Anchor
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 528
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385491037

Reviews

[clementine]

This one is certainly not exciting or plot-driven, but I find Atwood's writing just spellbinding. This book reminded me of Cat's Eye in a lot of ways: the preoccupation with time and its passing, the middle-aged women looking back at their lives, the focus on childhood. God, Margaret Atwood writes childhood so well, so painfully. I saw the parallels between Tony, Charis, and Roz - their cold mothers, their childhood tragedies, their bizarre rituals as coping mechanisms, their dysfunctional relationships with men. If taken as purely realistic fiction then I think the character of Zenia breaks down: she is simply too evil and too motiveless to make sense. But if we embrace the hints of supernaturalism, I think Zenia makes sense as something altogether more than a human woman. She's a shapeshifter, able to find each woman's vulnerability with minimal effort.

When we watched Rosemary's Baby in a class I took on horror during undergrad, my professor said something that stuck with me: that even if you remove the supernatural and allegorical elements from the film, it's still terrifying, because it's about a woman's complete loss of bodily autonomy. I think the same is true for this book: take Zenia out of the picture, and it's still bleak and disturbing. It's a book about women struggling to shed their broken childhoods, whose relationships with men are by and large unhealthy - these things are true regardless of Zenia's (possibly demonic) influence.

There's a lot more than can be said here - about friendship forged through mutual adversity, about motherhood and daughterhood as trauma, about female characters as archetypes, about how women navigate male-dominated spaces. (Only Charis seems to bypass this in her professional life.) It's a slow burner, and I understand why it wouldn't appeal - but Margaret Atwood can frequently enchant me with her writing even when the narrative itself is not particularly thrilling.