Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing may be saddled with an ominous, academic, and vaguely morbid title, but it is really a droll, rambling, and readerly sort of book. The six essays printed here are distillations of lectures that Atwood presented at Cambridge University in 2000. They range through most of the major dilemmas of the art of writing and probe the various perceived duties of the writer--from political apologist to vatic poet.
Atwood fans who are aching for personal revelation will be disappointed by the lectures; only one of them is directly autobiographical, and it reads like a synopsis of the first third of Cat's Eye. Most of Negotiating with the Dead examines the representation of writers (and painters, and musicians, and other creative types) in world literature. The lectures form an impressively comprehensive list of writerly neuroses and allegiances, although there is little here that hasn't been said before. But if this territory will be instantly recognizable to any serious writer, it may surprise hardened readers, prompting a reappraisal of what these strange book-producing creatures really do with their lives.