Life Before Man, Atwood's fourth novel, makes the same kind of potent connections [that one finds in her best poetry], and makes them not so much with a poet's language … as with a poet's economy. On a single typical page we are moved from a routine listing of the detritus of a young woman's life, "a straight black skirt, a mauve slip … a pair of pantyhose, the kind that comes in plastic eggs," to an apprehension of mood as extravagantly bleak as [that of "Mid-Winter, pre-solstice"]: "She thinks about her hands, lying at her sides, rubber gloves: she thinks about forcing the bones and flesh down into those shapes of hands, one finger at a time, like dough."

Life Before Man moves by a succession of countless such small surprises, from the everyday world of Toronto in the mid-Seventies back into the unpeopled drafts of prehistory…. (p. 33)

The...