["Bodily Harm"] bristles with intelligence and is often so witty that I wondered why I wasn't enjoying it more. The trouble may lie with the tropes. These are clever but obtrusive and can make the story seem to be no more than a hook for hanging symbols on. Atwood's metaphors are deft, but there are just too many of them: almost anything can stand for something else. When Rennie's untidy lover fails to throw out empty containers and keeps glancing at her blouse, it is because Rennie has had a mastectomy and the blouse too is an empty container.

The mastectomy itself—bodily harm—prefigures worse to come and may be an emblem of the harms wreaked by the consumer society…. Reification is rampant. We are objects for each other's skills and jokes—the most painful being inadvertent, as when Rennie's doctor, just before diagnosing cancer, asks whether...