NONFICTION - Feb. 19, 1995

GOOD BONES & SIMPLE MURDERS by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday: $20; 165 pp.) It’s true, you know: In all of children’s literature there’s not a single wicked stepfather. Conversely, when’s the last time you saw a Mixmistress in the kitchen? And who’s to say Hamlet’s mother didn’t do it? Lord knows she had the motive. Or why bats get such a bum rap? Why not “vampire turtles”? These are the ripe and random thoughts of Margaret Atwood, impossible to categorize. Never more than four pages long--more often two--these, uh, pieces are like furniture in an expensive doll’s house: exquisitely fashioned miniatures arranged with wit and whimsy. These are parables, observations, fairy tales (the real poop on the Little Red Hen), disquisitions. . . . Call them Atwoodwinds. Call them marvelous. But by all means, call them. Some are serious--on hunger, on rape, on an aging stripper--slipped in to keep the game honest. Most are hilarious, outrageous, feminist, as a startled extraterrestrial’s take on humans: “The prong people tell the cavern people that the latter are not people at all and are in reality more akin to dogs or potatoes”; “when a person has achieved ‘death,’ a kind of picnic is held, with music, flowers and food.” The Cinderella gig is reconstructed, PC: Don’t call Cindy beautiful (intimidating to the average woman), poor (socio-economically she’s middle-class) or good (judgmental and moralistic); and don’t knock Stepmom: “She herself had been abused as a child.” A newborn babe is terrified to find himself surrounded by animals, “each one of them stuffed,” and, Atwood clarifies truth the way a chef clarifies butter. Don’t miss it.