Reader Response on “Death by Landscape” by Margaret Atwood

             First, I want to admire Atwood’s opening declarative sentence. We’ve been talking about sentences that tell lately and I thought this was a heck of a way to start: “Now that the boys are grown up and Rob is dead, Lois has moving to a condominium apartment in one of the new waterfront developments” (44). I immediately found out so much about the story I’m getting into and it intrigued me to read more. That one sentence tells me Lois is very alone.

            I love how the story goes into so much detail about her art at the beginning, name-dropping here and there and then pulls the carpet from underneath you: “She bought them because she wanted them…it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out” (45). As soon as I thought I was getting to know Lois as a woman who likes art and takes pride in how fancy it is, she becomes vulnerable, exposed. I felt empathy for Lois that I don’t quite understand. Something about someone looking at you from a painting is both creepy and incredibly lonely. These feelings didn’t subside as I kept reading, especially in reading about the camp. I admire all the details included such as the songs, the way the woman even shook hands, the semi-well off crowd that attended. The line “Lois had other friends in winter…but Lucy was her summer friend” (47) is both sad but incredibly true. I myself attended summer camp and those friends were exactly that—summer camp friends.

            The story transitions well from the camp to Lois and Lucy. The first exchange between them on 47 cracked me up. Including that Lois “cast a look of minor scorn around the cabin” really brought me there. When Lois says her father plays golf and Lucy replies that even her mother does, I actually laughed out loud at “Lois’s mother did not.” I don’t why, but the dialogue was set up perfectly for that moment. It’s a trivial conversation but an important one. At this point in the story I felt as if I was looking through a camera. The lens zooms away from Lois and onto Lucy and her character, then outward completely to make a social commentary on Indians. Then we get to this point where the narrator asks “Was there anything important, anything that would provide some sort of reason of clue to what happened next?” (50). I became excited at this, almost a little cautious. What was the point of this story? The focus shifts so much like snapshots or like the paintings in Lois’ room.

            The definitive point came when Lois and Lucy decide to hike the boulders. This story had been quite normal, and then a ball is dropped just like that. It didn’t surprise me as much as I would have assumed. I think there was enough set up and hints (depression, unhappiness) to prepare the reader that something like Lucy’s disappearance. Somehow the story came full circle for me even though I still have plenty of questions. There is resolution, but it’s not tied up with a pretty bow. The image she presents at the end, “[Lucy] is in Lois’ apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive” (56) captures the essence of the story in one sentence. Everything in the scenery is alive, has color, has movement. The whole time she is trying to convince herself that Lucy, too, is alive. That being said, I appreciated all the focus on scenery, which only attributes more to Lois’ character. She describes certain scenes with specific, such as when Lucy and her are outside and she says “out on the lake there were two loons, calling to each other in their insane, mournful voices” (51). This beautiful language provides a nice contrast for the quirky details Atwood includes.