Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood
Summary
An unnamed narrator, an illustrator, returns from Toronto to the remote Quebec island where she grew up, searching for her father, who has vanished from the family cabin under circumstances no one can explain. She brings her lover Joe along with a married couple, Anna and David, whom she does not particularly like, and David keeps filming everything for a pretentious art project he calls Random Samples. Diving into the lake to search for a rock painting her father had once mapped, she instead finds what she takes at first for his drowned body, a discovery that starts unraveling memories she has spent years actively suppressing: not the husband and child she has been telling Joe and the others she once had, but an affair with a married art teacher who pressured her into an illegal abortion, the invented child a story she built to avoid facing what that loss actually was. As Anna and David's marriage curdles into open cruelty in front of her and Joe pushes for a commitment she cannot give him, the narrator drifts further from the group, refuses to leave the island with them, and hides alone, convinced she must abandon language and human shape entirely to be forgiven by her dead parents, smashing her own possessions and sleeping outdoors without food. Hunger and cold eventually bring her back to herself, and she deliberately seduces Joe, half believing a child of her own might undo what she lost years earlier; watching him afterward from hiding as he searches the island for her, she recognizes, for what seems like the first time, that she might genuinely love him rather than simply use him. The novel ends there, unresolved, the narrator still alone on the shore, neither fully returned to the world she left nor certain she wants to be.
Atwood tells the whole story from inside the narrator's own increasingly unreliable point of view, so a reader has to work out which of her memories are invented well before she does herself; the disorientation is deliberate, closer to watching a slow breakdown than solving a mystery. It reads with real tension through its middle stretches and grows genuinely strange near the end, when the prose itself starts fracturing alongside the narrator, a shift some readers consider the book's most striking achievement and others find simply difficult to follow.
Historical Context & Significance
McClelland and Stewart published Surfacing in Canada in 1972, Atwood's second novel and a deliberate companion piece to her poetry collection Power Politics, published the year before. No literary prize marked its first publication. Reception at the time was respectful rather than enthusiastic; the novelist Marge Piercy, reviewing Atwood's early work, pushed back specifically on the ending, asking how the narrator stops being someone who loses by choosing to stay with Joe, a man Piercy read as another kind of loser rather than a genuine resolution to the novel's argument.
The book has since become one of the founding texts of both Canadian literary nationalism and second wave feminist fiction, credited alongside Atwood's own critical study Survival, published the same year, with helping define what a distinctly Canadian literature could look like apart from British and American models. It was adapted into a little seen 1981 film, and while it never won a prize on release, it has stayed continuously in print and on university syllabi far longer than most of its immediate contemporaries.