http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/mccarthy-atwood.html amazing how unperceptive Mary McCarthy's review of The Handmaid's Tale was. I think there are three reasons for this: 1) she was too old to see the Right as a real threat; to her they were bumpkins and yahoos who might temporarily attain power but could not alter the course of history; also, she could not see how the new Right was more like the totalitarian Left in the way it looked at things. 2) she was just too insulated from the life of her time; she could disdain credit cards because she never had to pay for something she couldn't immediately afford, which was not true of most Americans in 1986 3) she was determined to be 'tough' and to not particularly read or write 'as a woman' which I think hurt her in reading Atwood's novel.
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