Now there is snow covering everything, and the cold is bitter even when the sun is shining, so I read this week’s story and lecture inside, under an afghan, tucked into the corner of one of the warmer rooms (saving the warmest for later winter months—like being in training, for weather-aware sitting).

“Debt as Plot,” the third lecture in the Massey series for Payback (which I started in MARM2022 Week One), left me feeling distinctly underread. Somehow, in the earlier chapters, I did not expect that I’d remember my studies on mythology and religious stories, so I followed along like this was my introduction to the materials, but here Atwood refers to novels and stories I’ve actually read, but I have such a hazy recall of them that I wonder why I bothered to read them in the first place, and I still sit passively while she explains their significance to the topic at hand.

But never mind, because even if you haven’t read any of them, you’ll learn the entire story in a paragraph or two, including who dies and how (because debt as plot is often a tragic affair). So if you’re spoilerphobic (as I am), you’ll want to steer clear, unless you don’t care what happens in A Christmas Carol (the least tragic, but with a key reference to Old Scratch, the devil), Dr. Faustus, “The Devil and Tom Walker” (a Washington Irving story with interesting connections to the former two stories), Pilgrim’s Progress (yes, I read this in school, didn’t you?), the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Girl with No Hands, Mill on the Floss, Madame Bovary, House of Mirth, and Vanity Fair.

As with the earlier lectures, and because I lack a deeper familiarity with these stories, I found the parts that intersect with Atwood’s personal experience most engaging. And, I related to this bit about her reflection on her own encounters with Victorian fiction, because, like her:

“When I was young and simple, I thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love; but now, in my more complicated riper years, I see that it’s also driven by money, which indeed holds a more central place in it than love does, no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved idealistically aloft.”

From this point, she succinctly summarises the events of Wuthering Heights, one paragraph containing all but one plot point, and illustrates her point with both clarity and a dramatic flourish. “The best nineteenth-century revenge is not seeing your enemy’s red blood all over the floor but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet.”

Remember, from MARM2022 Week Two, she knows that the bloodiest bits make for the best story. “Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way, without story, there is no debt.”

This connects nicely with the third story in Dancing Girls, “Polarities,” which has a deeper layer about class and privilege, than I likely would have noticed as a “young and simple” reader but which, in my “riper years” (hee hee), seems vitally important. This setting, for instance, which speaks of impermanence and scarcity:

The house was one of the featureless two-storey boxes thrown up by the streetful in the years after the war when there was a housing boom and materials were scarce. It was stuccoed with a greyish gravel Morrison found spiritually depleting. There were a few older houses, but they were quickly being torn down by developers; soon the city would have no visible past at all. Everything else was highrises, or worse, low barrack-shaped multiple housing units, cheaply tacked together. Sometimes the rows of flimsy buildings—snow on their roofs, rootless white faces peering suspiciously out through their windows, kids’ toys scattered like trash on the walks—reminded him of old photographs he had seen of mining camps. They were the houses of people who did not expect to be living in them for long.

This is where Louise lives—in a basement apartment. Which we are to read as a place of even greater impermanence, even more intense scarcity. But in that younger, simpler reading? The story could be about whether the connection between Morrison and Louise will develop into a more serious relationship. In a “riper years’” reading, it’s about Louise’s opportunities.

When she has a psychological and emotional breakdown, she is hospitalized; from that point, her choices are increasingly limited, and Morrison feels increasingly helpless:

“Most of those inside were getting worse rather than better; many had to stay there because no one would take the responsibility of looking after them, even if they were drugged into manageability. They were poor, without relations; the hospital would not let them go away by themselves.”

There are glimmers, too, of Atwood’s first novel, Surfacing (1972), with the question of how Canadian and American identities contrast. Morrison is not in Canada as a “draft dodger” but he knows that people assume otherwise and he doesn’t contradict their narrative. He’s “not overjoyed” by the anti-Americanism that Leota and Paul exhibit, but “the best defence was to agree.” He makes light of the situation, for Louise’s sake, because they are her friends.

“’You Yanks are coming up and taking all our jobs,’ Paul would say, and Morrison would nod affably. ‘That’s right, you shouldn’t let it happen. I wonder why you hired me?’ Leota would start in about how the Americans were buying up all the industry, and Morrison would say, ‘Yes, it’s a shame. Why are you selling it to us?’”

Even here, it’s the economic concerns that underscore Paul and Leota’s “bitter sallies” and spark Morrison’s retorts. It’s easy to see why Margaret Atwood recommends the writing of Jess Walters, most recently (in a thread about books to read when you’re home during the pandemic) The Cold Millions. Last year, for MARM, I read a few of the authors whose books she had recommended: Vincent Lam, Claudia Rankine, Madeline Ashby, and Louise Erdrich.

Even though I’ve only read a couple of Jess Walter’s short stories and Beautiful Ruins, he’s a contender for my MRE (MustReadEverything) author list based on how I’ve heard him speak in interviews and podcasts. What he values in stories as a reader and as a writer is akin to my own priorities, so I don’t care where he sets his stories, I’m keen to read them. Having said that, I was surprised to find myself in the Pacific Northwest United States, in the early twentieth century. Surprised to find myself queuing a documentary about the Wobblies on Kanopy.

The Cold Millions opens with an apt and evocative quotation, and I’ll close with it, to offer a cool breeze to the visitors from warm places and to offer some recognition to others in northern climes just now:

Darkness came on that town like a candle being snuffed. This was my wife’s primary complaint about Spokane after two years of me copping there, what Rebecca called the ‘drastic sark’ of autumn. We’d come from Sioux City, a town she still called home, and where I’d walked an easier beat. I found Spokane im a land-spec ad, but the piece I bought turned out to be cliff-face basalt and not arable, so we took four rooms in a brick apartment north of the river, and I got on with that roughneck police force. These were hard years, ’08 and ’09, everything about Spokane hard, bringing to mind Rebecca’s word, drastic. Steep hills, deep canyons, cold winters, hot summers, and those dark autumn evenings that made her so melancholy, when five felt like midnight.

Have you ever read a book because another author recommended it (via a blurb perhaps)? Or, perhaps even discovered a new favourite writer in this way?