Payback by Margaret Atwood

Some writers lose their sense of humor with age. V.S. Naipaul, for instance, seems to have lost his after publishing A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.

Other writers, on the other hand, find their sense of humor. Margaret Atwood’s gray, earnest early novels Surfacing and Life Before Man put me off her work for some time. But The Handmaid’s Tale had flashes of wit, and some dark satire for those who know Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Oryx and Crake is hilarious in a postapocalyptic kind of way.

Payback is a highly original work of nonfiction, a look at the many aspects and mechanisms of debt. The breezy style cannot disguise the rigorous thinking in this book, and some of the darker corners Atwood explores would be hard to face without her light touch.

The chapter “Debt as Plot” looks at how money and debt drive the action of novels like Vanity Fair and The Mill on the Floss. 

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. Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. And so it goes, through novel after novel. 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.