prefer “recovering,” for a true alcoholic is always an aicoholic. The reader immediately sees Wes's faulty reasoning. His intentions at the time may be good, but one can go on the wagon in one’s own backyard, Wes is setting both himself and his wife up for a fall. Third, Wes leaves his girlfriend, which is sadly ironic. An alcoholic in denial never leaves his girlfriend, who is, really, the bottle. Alcohol is a powerful, beguiling lover, and to a true alcoholic in denial the lover is always faithful. Fourth, the true test of Wes’s resolve to quit drinking comes with Chef's wanting his house back. Indeed, Chef is an ironic word here. The man isa “recovered” alcoholic, but his house is a cauldron of memories, and while Wes is living in it he is in a stew, or stewing, for he is still in denial; an alcoholic in denial will jump the wagon at the first excuse. Fifth, once Wes decides to return to the bottle he rationalizes his predica- ment, His wife notices something in his look as soon as he receives Chef's “this look about him. 1 knew that look” (300). His principal rational- ion is, “We were born who we are” (301). That is true. But alcoholics don’t have to drink. There is a saying in AA that “One drink is too much and a thou- sand aren't enough.” Wes wants to get drunk. It is that simple. Finally, Wes, paradoxically, doesn’t run to the nearest carryout. He doesn’t have to. Once he has made up his mind to drink, there is plenty of time. He is enjoying the anticipation of the first drink, much like a lover anticipating that first kiss and the subsequent “loving.” Furthermore, deep inside Wes knows that however sweet that first kiss the outcome will be a bad one. Moreover, he also knows that his “girlfriend” is a very patient lover. —JOHN MAGEE, Ohio Northern University WORK CITED Carver, Raymond. “Chef's House.” Where I'm Calling From. New York: Vintage, 1989. Atwood’s EDIBLE WOMAN and SURFACIN In his study of Margaret Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, George Wood- cock asserts that Joe, the taciturn lover of the novel's unnamed narrator, is “the most enigmatic character in the book” and asks, “is he deep or is he just dumb?” (52). Atwood, though, seems to give an important clue to our under- standing of the character by reference to her earlier novel, The Edible Woman, thereby providing an intriguing perspective for considering both works. 12Joe (no surname is ever given), one of four major characters in Surfacing, is the only one to share the name of a significant figure in The Edible Woman: Joe Bates, husband of Clara, who is a friend of the novel’s protagonist, Mari- an McAlpin. Along with names and physical characteristics—both, interest- ingly, are described as “shaggy” (Surfacing 8; Edible Woman 36)—the two Joes share several important additional qualities. Each is characterized throughout in rather ambiguously sympathetic terms; both appear quite reti- cent; and most prominently, both possess a seeming solicitude toward women that masks a more fundamental antipathy. This last quality is brought out in numerous contexts, The “solicitude” of Joe Bates in The Edible Woman is emphasized from the beginning of the novel; the narrator comments repeatedly on Joe’s “protective attitude towards Clara”: “one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles” (36); and he has an almost ostentatious tendency “to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection” (34). This seems quite straightfor- ward, yet at the novel’s conclusion, Joe is describing Woman generally (with curious clinical detachment) as “hollow, she doesn’t know who she is any more; her core has been destroyed.” And, finally, he suggests: “Maybe women shouldn't be allowed to go to university at all: then they wouldn’t always be feeling later that they’ve missed out on the life of the mind” (236). The Joe of Surfacing exhibits the same blend of overt concern and strained hostility toward women. Early in the novel, he helpfully offers to accompany the narrator as she goes in search of further information on her mi: ‘ing father, but when she refuses, “relief gleams through his beard” (17). Later, he asks her to marry him (echoing Joe Bates's concern for “unmarried girls”) but couches his proposal in remarkably tepid, even antagonistic terms: “We should get married” (92); “I think we should... we might as weil” (93). And when the narrator refuses him, his animosity is quick to surface: “‘Some- times,’ he said, placing his words evenly and deliberately, pegs in a peg-board, ‘I get the feeling you don’t give a shit about me™” (93). Yet at the conclusion of the novel, Joe is the only one to return to the island to search for the narrator after she has fled from him and their friends, and she explicitly acknowledges her “love” (207) for him. But even here as he repeat- edly calls out for her, his “voice is annoyed,” and she realizes that “he won't wait longer” (208) for her, as she watches ambivalently from the forest. If the two Joes are the same character several years apart, Atwood’s purpose in providing this explicit link between the two works is not difficult to discern. The novels together develop a remarkably insightful portrait of that legendary decade, the Sixties. In Edible Woman (written in 1965), the cataclysmic changes in morality, behavior, and social and gender roles are only beginning to be felt (for example, Marian’s reluctance to accept the role of the submis- sive suburban housewife; Ainsley's “shocking” decision to bear a child out of. 13wedlock); in Surfacing, the sad aftermath of these changes has become all too apparent. ft seems evident that between the two novels, Joe Bates—in a common- enough occurrence, as any survivor of the era can testify—threw over his wife, children, and academic career, grew a beard, “dropped out,” and took up a craft and a new lover, defiantly choosing to “do his own thing.” as the say- ing went. But his transformation from a conventional, if harried husband, father, and absent-minded academic luxuriating in “the life of the mind” (236) to an impoverished, friendless, sullen, incompetent potter—in short, a pathet- ic, directionless failure—seems a deliberately devastating ictment of the decade. The pervasive sense in the later novel of wasted opportunities, deep- ening bitterness, isolation, and empty—even aborted—lives casts a con- sciously dark shadow over the era of so-called freedom and liberation. ‘Avwood’s skillful embodiment in a single character of the perniciousness of these changes both displays an unexpected facility for implied social com- mentary and offers a new perspective for examining her already intriguing narratives. —HENRY C. PHELPS, University College of the Cariboo, British Columbia WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret, The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland, 1969, . Surfacing. Toronto: Paperjacks, 1972. Woodeock, George. Introducing Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. Toronto: ECW Press, 1990, Mukherjee’s JASMINE Despite postcolonial readings of Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine, West- erm critics have not placed in context the pivotal play of migrations, forced and voluntary, literal and figurative, found in the plural female subjectivity of the novel,! With the connotations of both dislocation and progress within the tan- gled framework of the narrator's personal history, journey as metaphor in the novel stands for the ever-moving, regenerating process of life itself. In pre- senting a woman capable of birthing more than one self during the course of her lifetime, Mukherjee invests her novel with the unique form of a Hindu bil- dungsroman, where the body is merely the shell for the inner beings journey toward a more enlightened and empowered subjectivity. But the material self exists and is the site of oppression and transformation. Cognizant of the formidable interventions of gender, s, religion, and his- 14