As an American writer, reader, and teacher, I would like to be able to tell you that we here in the States are big fans of the great Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood. But it isn’t quite so. We are her fans, of course, but the idea of her as a Canadian novelist, however fundamental to her aesthetic and her identity, has a way of eluding our attention. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise: we Americans, worldly as we may be, tend to ignore our neighbour to the north. The exception is when something from Canada sucks, at which point we go out of our way to mock it. If something from Canada is awesome, on the other hand, we tend to claim it as our own, or at the very least file it away in our minds in a folder marked “Might as well be American.” Or, if we’re feeling generous, a folder marked “North American.”

Atwood’s best-known novel here — and, I presume, among her best-known elsewhere, too — is 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a harrowing, dystopian metafiction about a concubine living in a phallocentric, theocratic dictatorship of the near future. This state of affairs has been arrived at by way of a military coup that brings down the government — the American government, I mean. You could write a novel about an overthrow of the Canadian government, if you really wanted to, but nobody here would read it. You could probably overthrow the actual Canadian government, and it would barely make the American evening news. They would put it on right before the late-night talk shows, perhaps preceded by a story about a horse that can multiply and divide. Which, come to think of it, sounds like something out of an Atwood novel.

The Handmaid’s Tale has proven a sturdy text in American colleges. We assign it for its explorations of gender politics, race, and American-style nativist ideology. We dig its Nabokovian textual layers and its cracking-good storyline. We marvel at its emotional honesty, its black humour, its disrespect for the boundaries of genre. It’s the subject of many American critical essays — the American Library Association even threw a conference on it. An entire conference! On just this one book!

You couldn’t say any of this was bad for Atwood. The book took an already-respected career and turned it into a kind of religion. With any luck, the people of 2210 will regard The Handmaid’s Tale the way we regard 1984: not quite on the money, but eerily prescient in unexpected ways. The book earned Atwood last-name-only status, as in “When’s the new Atwood coming out?”

But there’s a flip side to having a Big Book: the burden of always being associated with it, above and beyond everything else you’ve written. This is particularly vexing in the case of Atwood, whose larger career, unlike those of many writers of timeless blockbusters, rewards careful and obsessive examination. In the twenty-five years since her Big Book, her stylistic range has been extraordinary, her interests diverse. She has proven as adept at the small and obscure as she is at the grand and complex, and has revealed herself to be a brilliant eccentric, a comic fabulist and an inveterate tinkerer, a Willy Wonka of the literary arts — indeed, not just of the literary arts: one of her most interesting projects isn’t even a book. It’s a robot.

Atwood could only be Canadian. No other nation is simultaneously so huge and so obscure. She embodies this contradiction perfectly: she is wildly famous, and yet big swaths of her career seem to go more or less unnoticed. A consummate lit nerd, she pursues her interests with dogged persistence and obvious pleasure, without evident regard for what anybody thinks. Her equally talented countrywoman, Alice Munro, is a steadier kind of writer: her innovations are many but quiet, her particular skills reliable and regular. Atwood, on the other hand, is always throwing you a curve. (That’s a sports metaphor, by the way — you guys have baseball up there, right?)

The first curve, after The Handmaid’s Tale, was Cat’s Eye (1988), a novel about a woman named Elaine who makes art that is often pigeonholed as “feminist.” She travels to Toronto (referred to only as “the city of her youth” on the back cover of my mass-market paperback) for a retrospective of her paintings, and is interviewed by a reporter:

“Well, what about, you know, feminism?” she says. “A lot of people call you a feminist painter.”

“What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettoes. Anyway, I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so what’s the point of discussing it at all?”

“So it’s not a meaningful classification for you?” she says.

“I like it that women like my work. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Do men like your work?” she asks slyly…

“Which men?” I say. “Not everyone likes my work. It’s not because I’m a woman. If they don’t like a man’s work it’s not because he’s a man. They just don’t like it.” I am on dubious ground, and this enrages me.

The main business of Cat’s Eye, however, is the cruelty of children. Elaine’s return home sets off a series of memories, of her friends Grace and Carol and Cordelia and the shifting alliances among them. I confess that I didn’t like this book the first time I read it — a Handmaid’s Tale bandwagoneer, I had not yet read anything else of Atwood’s, and must have hoped for more sci-fi geekery.

What was I thinking? The world of these four girls is as strange and bleak as anything in the previous novel: Elaine, driven to nausea by Cordelia’s insidious influence, allows herself to be buried alive, and nearly freezes to death in a creek retrieving her thrown hat. (“There’s your stupid hat,” says Cordelia… “Why don’t you go and get it?”) Some of Atwood’s favourite riffs and motifs are on display here, notably several that would later be put to such marvellous use in the current MaddAddam trilogy: chants and songs, environmental destruction, genetic engineering. Elaine’s father, an entomologist, is preoccupied by a possible future in which everyone is diabetic and the world is covered with insulin-producing cows. And “he’s heard some son of a gun is working on an experiment to breed a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two drumsticks and two wings.” To judge from Oryx and Crake’s nauseating ChickieNobs, the experiment was a smashing success.