Cat's Eye

Elaine Risley grows up without other girls until her family settles in Toronto, and her sudden induction into a trio led by Cordelia teaches her a form of cruelty her tomboy childhood with her brother never prepared her for: staged trials for invented offenses, engineered exclusions, a running verdict on everything wrong with her delivered by girls who are also, unmistakably, her only friends. Atwood is precise about the mechanism: the cruelty never announces itself as cruelty, it arrives dressed as correction, as the other girls simply telling Elaine the truth about herself, which is what makes it take fifty years to name.

A blue cat's eye marble Elaine wins in a childhood trade becomes her private ballast against the group, something she can hold and disappear into when Cordelia's judgments get to be too much, and Atwood extends that same optic logic to Elaine's adult work as a painter, canvases that keep returning to eyes, glass, and the exact cold clarity of being looked at and found wanting. The marble isn't nostalgia. It's the origin of a way of seeing Elaine has spent a career turning into paint.

The novel's sharpest single act of cruelty comes when the girls leave Elaine stranded overnight in a frozen ravine, punishment for some offense the group never bothers to name, and her account of that night, half memory and half something closer to dissociation, becomes the wound her later paintings keep circling without ever quite covering it over. Cordelia's mother, Mrs. Smeath, whose smug religious propriety toward Elaine as an unbaptized outsider goes entirely unpunished at the time, resurfaces decades later as the subject of a series of unflattering canvases that scandalize critics reading them as feminist statement rather than the specific, personal reckoning Elaine actually intended.

As adults, the power between the two women visibly reverses, Cordelia adrift through failed acting classes and eventually a breakdown, appealing to Elaine for the kind of rescue she once would never have offered in return. Atwood refuses Elaine a clean revenge here: the sight of Cordelia diminished doesn't satisfy her, it unsettles her, since Elaine's whole adult self was built defensively against a girl who turns out, close up, to have been just as frightened and improvised as she was.