Scientist of the Human Heart

The Tent s Margaret Atwood’s third book of short prose pieces that might be called prose poems, sketches or musings. As in Murder in the Dark (1983) and Good Bones (1992), Atwood collects a number of disparate short writings—many of which have appeared in journals or elsewhere. Even at her most tentative and fanciful, Atwood is worth reading. She has much to tell us—some of it urgent—and her way of communicating things of importance is unique.

Atwood approaches human life—our lives—like a scientist. She is a careful observer: she declines embellishment; she employs logic. This positioning of herself probably owes much to her father, an entomologist at the University of Toronto, who took his family with him on summer field trips to camp in northern Quebec to study the habits of insects. In Morning in the Burned House (1995), her most recent collection of poetry, Atwood wrote in “Bored” of the tedium she felt assisting her...