/lit/ - Literature

A couple days ago, I asked anons to roll for book recommendations and promised to read whatever they suggested and write up a report. Luckily, they decided to assign me disgusting, trite, anti-natalist slave morality garbage, so I didn't have to, you know, read anything GOOD.
This book is awful. It consists of two parts: a fabricated and deliberately wrong-headed breakdown of a "neglected child" personality type, and a hysterical screed against globalism. Both fail utterly in their inability to comprehend that other people might not adhere to Atwood's limited, neoliberal, bourgeois mindset. (Sidebar: if you see the word "bourgeois" and immediately piss yourself with rage and want to take potshots at me as a commie, go back to /his/ or /pol/). Her inability to conceive of difference between herself and others looms over and warps terribly every part of the book.
The first thrust of the narrative, the life and times of main character Jimmy, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how neglected children mature. He is shown in his young childhood being ignored and forced into a care-taking, emotionally supportive position of his severely depressed mother and workaholic father. He develops various tactics to counter his mother's innatention, showing a willingness to hurt her feelings in order to get her attention.
So far so good. But the consequences of this upbringing are warped in a most insidious way; Atwood, as a bourgeois individual, cannot conceive of any sort of life which does not involve being the object of concerted attention by varied parties and interests. She has cast a character who should, in theory, have no one interested in him. Rather than grappling with the difference in temperament this upbringing would create– a child growing into an adult who craves attention and structure, is contemptful of external authority, thinks of themselves as unimportant but morally good, and doesn't think their actions as being of much consequence–she warps Jimmy to contort him into her own mindset. Rather than Jimmy growing up freely and holding himself to no standard, she portrays him as languishing under the "unclear" standards of his parents. The result of this unrealistic contortion is an adult Jimmy exactly like any other bourgeois person: resentful of authority, fearful of hurting other people, hateful of structure and longing for freedom, and dominated by self-hate and inferiority.
Cont.

I am 350 pages in, when does this start to get good?

Yeah, it's boring. I'm fascinated by theocracies, but it's still boring.

I loved this, though. Atwood legitimately got way better in old age.