C6| Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
It would
have
quizzed
Custer
on
how he
enjoyed
Little
Big Horn.working in the same building at
17-19 North Broadway for 26
years. Stop asking.
Why is my phone asking me
to opine on a building, or a foot-
path, or telling me about a team
in which I have no earthly inter-
est? I have no idea. Of course, I
suspect some weird liaison
among Google Maps, TripAdvi-
sor, Yelp and possibly the NSA.
Or maybe a rogue operating sys-
tem. A bewildering array of apps
appears to claim credit for the
bewildering array of demands
for my thoughts, but since I
never turned these urgentMOVING
TARGETSJOE
QUEENANWEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL| ELLEN GAMERMAN
M
argaret Atwood wouldn’t mind getting composted
one day.
The 79-year-old author brings this up—a response to
death that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of her
books—when discussing the financial windfall that she
expects from her new novel, “The Testaments.” She plans to give a por-
tion of the proceeds to her favorite causes, including a green startup that
is now lobbying for legal permission to turn human corpses into dirt.
Subjects like death and money are rarely too far from the conversa-
tion as the Canadian author prepares to release the most anticipated
novel of her life on Sept. 10. “The Testaments” is a sequel to her 1985
classic “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It takes readers back to a near-future
dystopian America and the repressive theocracy of Gilead, whose male
leaders have responded to infertility on a polluted planet by turning
women into reproductive slaves.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” became an acclaimed Hulu TV series, and
“The Testaments,” though not yet released, has already been shortlisted
for this year’s Booker Prize. Ms. Atwood is wry about the hype.
“I think they’re getting a little overexcited,” she said of her publishers
in the U.S. and the U.K. “I think what they’re secretly thinking is, ‘Thisis our last chance because then she’s going to die .’ I
don’t intend to, but you just never know.”
Ahead of a major book tour, she is leaning into her
role as literary celebrity. Ms. Atwood will preside over
a publication-day event in London featuring readings
by the actress Lily James at the National Theatre. The
event will be streamed to more than 1,300 cinemas
world-wide. She also posed in hair extensions for a
British publication, though her publicity photos have
limits. “I’m not naked covered in Vaseline with a
flower coming out of my bum,” she said.
When “The Handmaid’s Tale” arrived more than
three decades ago, President Ronald Reagan was
serving his second term, the Berlin Wall still stood,
and mobile phones were the size of a brick. Ms. At-
wood started the novel when she was 45 and living
in West Berlin. On visits to countries behind the Iron
Curtain, she was struck by the telling silences and
the feeling of being watched. Those experiences
made their way into “The Handmaid’s Tale.”Margaret Atwood
At 79, a sequel to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
It has sold more than 8 million copies
in English, and Ms. Atwood said it left “a
million questions” unanswered. The se-
quel addresses one of the first book’s cen-
tral mysteries: How did Gilead end? Its
collapse is made clear in the epilogue of
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” and Ms. Atwood
was interested both in how people talk
themselves into supporting oppressive
rulers and in how those regimes fall.
After considering a sequel for years,
Ms. Atwood said, writing it was like
standing at the edge of a freezing lake.
“You put your foot in, you take it out. ‘Am
I going to do this? No, I don’t think I want
to do this.’ The only way is to run in
screaming,” she said.
She jumped into writing “The Testa-
ments” in 2016, working on it during the
#MeToo movement and the election of
President Donald Trump. An outspoken
environmentalist, she said that the novel
reflects today’s schisms and anxieties.
“It’s very easy to start a mass panic,”
she said. “People are feeling fearful any-
way because of the climate crisis. So ev-
erybody starts looking askance at other
people. Once people are in that generally
fearful state of mind, you can get them
going about all sorts of things. ‘The house
is on fire. We need to lynch those people
now.’ And off you go.”
Ms. Atwood also was writing “The Tes-
taments” during the launch two years ago
of Hulu’s Emmy Award-winning adapta-
tion of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” She is an
executive producer for the show, which
has gone beyond the action of the original
novel, and she knew that her sequel
couldn’t flatly contradict that narrative.
The plot of “The Testaments” has never
appeared on the show, but Ms. Atwood
did ask Bruce Miller, the TV drama’s
showrunner, not to kill off one key charac-
ter and not to relocate another to Canada.
He obliged. Hulu, which recently wrapped
up the third season of “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” has the screen rights to “The Testa-
ments.”
Ms. Atwood’s publishers have guarded
the book’s release so closely that they in-
vented a dummy title and a fake author
name for review copies, calling it “The
Casements” by “Victoria Locket.” The
book also enjoys a different code name on
her publisher’s internal emails.
On a recent afternoon, in a hotel res-
taurant near her home in Toronto, Ms. At-
wood perched by a bar table surrounded
by TVs playing sports, talking about the
downfall of leaders who abuse their power. She
looked through the restaurant’s front window at a
man walking down the sidewalk wearing sunglasses
and earphones. In tyrannical governments, she said,
everyone is a suspect. Even that guy. She pointed at
him. He smiled and waved.
Two female fans approached her, bent slightly at
the knees, bursting with sorrys (for interrupting)
and thank yous (for her work). One of them ex-
plained that she had missed an event featuring the
author only because it occurred the day her father
died. “Oh dear,” Ms. Atwood said. “Oh God.” After
the woman left, Ms. Atwood said, “Welcome to my
world. So what was I telling you about?”
Ms. Atwood, who has three children and is the
longtime partner of the writer Graeme Gibson, is
particularly interested in how words can outlast the
lives of their creators. Five years ago, she became
the first writer to participate in the “Future Li-
brary,” a Norwegian art installation by the artist Ka-
tie Paterson compiling 100 secret texts submitted by
celebrated authors—one a year, starting in 2014 and
ending in 2114—to be held unpublished for a cen-
tury. Ms. Atwood wasn’t allowed to show her work,
“Scribbler Moon,” to anyone. She flew with it to
Norway and tied it with a blue ribbon, hoping that
she wouldn’t be arrested if a customs officer asked
her to open the box and she refused. The work will
be revealed with 99 others in 2114.
“It’s a really hopeful project,” Ms. Atwood said,
“because it’s assuming there are going to be readers
in a hundred years.”IAN PATTERSON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
REVIEW
squeaked by the Indians 2-1.
I am sure that many histori-
cal figures would have been
similarly irritated had this sort
of intrusive technology flour-
ished in their own eras.
Tell me, Julius, “How was
your trip to the Roman Senate
on the Ides of March? On a
scale of one-to-five, how would
you rate the experience?”
Hey, Lt. Col. Custer, “Please
rate your trip to the Little Big
Horn. Do you have any photos
to share? Can you think of any
ways your Little Big Horn expe-
rience could have been im-
proved? By the way, the Chi-
cago White Stockings beat the
A’s 5-4.”
What worries me most is the
possibility that things could get
worse. Suppose my phone, no-
ticing that I have just visited a
hospital, asks me to rate my
heart operation. Suppose it
asks me to report on my visit
to Sing-Sing? Suppose it’s still
in my pocket at my funeral and
asks how I enjoyed my trip to
Beatific Vistas Cemetery?
That’ll be the last question it
ever asks. ROBERT NEUBECKERMY SMARTPHONE is constantly
asking me if I enjoyed my trip to
the park or the river walk, scant
seconds after I have left. The
screen of my electronic Nosy
Parker continually flashes with
urgent queries about how I en-
joyed my coffee, my snack, my
gelato. And for some reason, it
keeps giving me updates on Chi-
cago White Sox games.
“Please rate your trip to Bel-
las Restaurant, using numbers
one through five,” it says. “Your
opinion is important to us.”
“White Sox 5, Twins 4. Bot-
tom of the sixth.”
I don’t actually mind being
queried about my comings and
goings, nor about my tastes. I
know that my phone is merely
trying to gather information
that can be passed on to other
consumers. It is not spying on
me. It is not dogging my everyheel. And I honestly
do believe that my
opinion is important
to it. There is no rea-
son why my phone
would lie to me about
something like that.
But one thing does
bother me about the way my
phone frames its questions. To a
smartphone, the landscape is al-
ways flat. A phone has no sense
of scale or perspective, and it
certainly has no sense of occa-
sion. For example, it does not
surprise me when my phone
asks me to rate the Grand Can-
yon or the Museo del Prado
when I have just seen them. But
I don’t like when it pesters me
about my latest trip to the hard-
ware store or the barber shop.
And I hate when it keeps asking:
“How was your visit to 17-19
North Broadway?” I’ve beenflashes on, I have no sense
that I can turn them off.
One thing that I find
massively annoying about
my compulsively inquisi-
tive device is when I have
just had an absolutely
terrible experience and
my phone—guileless, un-
sophisticated, bereft of
all social graces—asks if I
enjoyed it.
When I have just been
caught in a deluge while
walking along the Hud-
son, I do not want to be
asked: “How was your trip to
Horan’s Landing?” When I have
just had a meal so bad I could
actually see the jockey’s whip
marks on the burger, I do not
want to be asked if my trip to
the fast-food joint was all that I
hoped it would be. When I have
been to an appalling concert, a
horrendous play, a crummy art
exhibition or a disastrous foot-
ball game, I don’t want to be
badgered about it seconds after
I leave the venue. And when
the Phillies have just lost 13-1
to the Mets, I do not want to be
told that the White SoxWhy Does My
Smartphone Ask Such
Dumb Questions?
‘It’s very
easy
to start
a mass
panic.’