The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last is Margaret Atwood’s 2015 novel, expanded from the earlier novella I’m Starved for You and grown into a full length book over the course of several years. The setup is pure dystopian Atwood. After an economic collapse has left huge numbers of people homeless and unemployed in the United States, a private corporation called Consilience has built an experimental community called Positron, where residents take turns living a normal middle class suburban life and serving time as inmates in a model prison.

The novel follows Stan and Charmaine, a married couple sleeping in their car and barely surviving, who sign up for the Positron program in desperation. They split their time between their assigned suburban house and their cells in the prison, alternating with another couple who use the same house when they are inside. The Alternates, as they are called, have their own bedroom in the house and are not supposed to interact with Stan and Charmaine. Of course they do, and the slow inversion of who is sleeping in whose bed quickly becomes the least of the program’s problems.

Atwood uses the premise to dig into a series of increasingly uncomfortable questions about consent, surveillance, the privatization of public services, the gendered economy of the body, and the weird new technologies that the corporation is quietly developing in the basement. The middle of the book takes a turn into territory that is both science fictional and morally bracing, and the final third pushes through to one of the strangest endings Atwood has written.

The novel was not received as warmly as The Handmaid’s Tale or the MaddAddam trilogy, partly because the comic register sits uneasily next to the genuinely disturbing material. For readers who can handle the tonal mix, The Heart Goes Last is a sharp late period Atwood novel that deserves more attention than it has received. It is also a book that feels increasingly relevant as the issues it satirizes continue to play out in real corporate experiments.