ANGELA CARTER UPDATES: When last I blogged about the fun feminist fabulist, I was re-reading Love, one of her earlier novels. I’ve now finished Love and Shadow Dance (which I think was her debut) and am now almost halfway through The Magic Toyshop, which I think was one of my two favorites in high school (along with Heroes and Villains; I thought The Fantastic Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman was a more important book than those two, but “favorite” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “best”). Here are some thoughts on how Carter’s books have changed since high school–by which I mean, of course, how I’ve changed.

1) I now notice that her metaphors go on way too long and her language frequently skids from “lush” into “histrionic.” This is especially a problem in The Magic Toyshop, but all three books I’ve re-read so far have a melodramatic, sturm und drang, adolescent fever to them. (Here’s a metaphor-overkill example from TMT: “They all had more tea. Jonathon took no interest in the room or the company. He sat with his eyes fixed on great breakers rolling on a coral atoll somewhere in the immense Pacific. A bottle swept up to his feet and rolled in a rock pool. He smashed it open. There was a message in it. He read it with surprise. It prompted a question. From a long way away, he asked, ‘When shall we see our uncle?'” Sentences three through 8 1/2 are metaphor. Eh.) On the other hand, she also has some great lines, especially in Love, but I don’t have the energy to dig them up. Maybe later.

2) In these three books, which are all among her earlier works, she isn’t really writing any female characters that I now (post-adolescence) find at all attractive. Her younger women are a) lost, self-destructive, opaque and unpredictable waifs (Annabel, Ghislaine) or b) your basic self-important, Freudian teen (Melanie). Her older women are either wrecks or pathetic women who crave the children they’ll never bear. Although Carter nails the patronizing pity of well-off women for disadvantaged men–she’s ferocious in her depictions of condescension–she herself tends to condescendingly pity women who want children. Now, post-teenhood, post-reading Maggie Gallagher, I find this inability to empathetically imagine motherhood really troubling. I seem to recall that the only women who really break this mold in a believable, compelling way are the sisters in Carter’s last book, Wise Children–I can’t remember if they have or wanted children, though. (Wise Children is probably Carter’s best book, although I’m reserving judgment on that until I re-read Heroes and Villains.)

3) By contrast, Carter’s feline, masculine, dangerous men are still really attractive, even though Carter is bracingly aware of the grim damage that can be done by men seeking to fulfill their masculinity by being “dangerous” or “unpredictable.”

4) The afterword to Love , written 18 years after Carter initially wrote the book, is much less satisfying and convincing than the ending. In the afterword, Carter tries to imagine placid, politically aware futures for her smashed-up characters: This one is a pacifist feminist protester on Greenham Common, that one manages a club in New York, etc. It manages to be more depressing than the uber-depressing finale of the original novel, simply because it feels so deflated–it’s descended from the first things, love and hate and family and desire and despair, to politics.