Heart Goes Last (Atwood) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
As the narrative builds and couples try to regain their freedom, the quest is sometimes thrilling, sometimes comic, often absurd and entirely engaging, spinning sins into the territory of Elvis-themed escorts, stuffed-animal carnality and customizable sexbots.…What keeps The Heart Goes Last fresh, as with the rest of Atwood's recent work, is that while it revisits earlier themes of her oeuvre, it never replicates. Rather, it reads like an exploration continued, with new surprises, both narratively and thematically, to be discovered…Margaret Atwood…has become something nearly as fantastical as one of her storytelling subjects: a living legend who continues to remain fresh and innovative on the page. The Heart Goes Last is a captivating jump into the absurdity of dominance and desire, love and independence—opposing forces that never find resolution.
Mat Johnson - New York Times Book Review


At first a classic Atwood dystopia, rationally imagined and developed, [The Heart Goes Last] relaxes suddenly into a kind of surrealist adventure. The satirical impulse foregrounds itself. Narrative drive ramps up … Atwood allows her sense of the absurd its full elbow room; her cheerfully caustic contempt–bestowed even-handedly on contemporary economics, retro culture, and the social and neurological determination of identity–goes unrestrained … Jubilant comedy of errors, bizarre bedroom farce, SF prison-break thriller, psychedelic 60s crime caper: The Heart Goes Last scampers in and out of all of these genres, pausing only to quote Milton on the loss of Eden or Shakespeare on weddings. Meanwhile, it performs a hard-eyed autopsy on themes of impersonation and self-impersonation, revealing so many layers of contemporary deception and self-deception that we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Guardian (UK)


[The Heart Goes Last] opens with an evocation of sub-prime poverty so hopeless, so crushing, and yet so engrossing that within 10 pages you don’t know whether to weep or applaud … You never lose the eerie feeling that each feature of this world could rematerialise in our own. It’s what makes her fiction the opposite of the escapism of the geek genres. It’s the lack of an escape route that shapes the predicaments of Atwood’s characters. That and an imagination without equal.
London Evening Standard (UK)


(Starred review.) In the dystopian landscape of the unflappable Atwood’s latest novel, there are "not enough jobs, and too many people.... Atwood is fond of intricate plot work, and the novel takes a long time to set up the action, but once it hits the last third, it gains an unstoppable momentum.
Publishers Weekly


In her first stand-alone novel since the Man Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin, published in 2000, Atwood draws on the same almost-here dystopia as her online Positron stories. Charmaine and Stan are barely getting by when they answer an ad for Consilience, a social experiment that allows them a comfortable home of their own in suburbia. The one little hitch is that every other month they must spend time in a prison cell. Classic Atwood.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] riotous plot.... This laser-sharp, hilariously campy, and swiftly flowing satire delves deeply into our desires, vices, biases, and contradictions, bringing fresh, incisive comedy to the rising tide of postapocalyptic fiction in which Atwood has long been a clarion voice.
Booklist


Dystopian cliches are played as farce in this nasty tale. Comparisons to Atwood's earlier work...are best avoided here. This slapped-together pastiche...will leave the few who have gotten [to the end] completely bewildered.... Atwood has taught her readers to expect better.
Kirkus Reviews