I despise Margaret Atwood. Living as I do in Toronto, such a statement may come off sounding like blasphemy. How can you say such a thing? ask the pious onlookers. It is precisely because I am from Toronto that I despise her.

As a high school student in Toronto, teachers made me read her poetry and novels. The first work I read was Surfacing, Atwood's first and least satisfying novel, but it was Canadian, and it seemed important to let us kids know that it was possible for a Canadian (and a woman no less) to publish a real novel. Then they made me read Life Before Man and Edible Woman, which, in retrospect, seem odd choices for teenaged boys. I had neither the interest nor the maturity to bother with passages about such things as the complexities of sex after a mastectomy.

And so, in university (ironically majoring in English at Atwood's alma mater), I made a point of avoiding the CanLit courses. Atwood continued to publish, and the novels just got bigger and bigger. I lost patience. I'm not going to sit for hours and read all that, I told myself. So when I saw Atwood's latest offering, The Tent, and when I saw that it was a slim 155 pages of well-spaced type with a generous helping of illustrations, I decided it was time to reacquaint myself with the divine Ms. A.

I have been duped! I had taken the book's size in the spirit of a manufacturer's warranty — it would be an easy, breezy read. I was mistaken. What is The Tent? The Tent is not a single, coherent narrative. It is vignettish — polished snippets that appeal to those of us born into the age of the short attention span and the three-second sound byte.

The first of the book's three sections gives the impression of an Accomplished Writer of a Significant Body of Work who takes a backward glance at her work, her life, a bit wistful, a bit regretful — a bit jaded? She addresses the younger writer. Is the acolyte's work any good? She isn't sure anymore. How does one judge such a thing? The old standards don't seem to help now. I begin to wonder if Ms. Atwood isn't putting rocks into her pockets and strolling into the Don River. But as I proceed to the second and third chapters, I see that she is up to her old tricks — with psychoanalytic fairy tales, skewed mythologies, and cautionary tales masquerading as science fiction.