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...

It is no surprise to discover, on the publication of "Life Before Man," that the Canadian Margaret Atwood is a writer of importance, with a deep understanding of human behavior, a beautiful understated style and, rarest of all, broad scope—an awareness of wide stretches of time and space…. That she is gifted was clear even in her first novel, "The Edible Woman," though that satiric feminist book tends toward the lightness of the confection that is its central image....

The characters in Margaret Atwood's fierce new novel, Life Before Man (life after man is the implied gallows joke), can't seem to get through a day without obsessing on extinction. Unlike Doris Lessing's fixation on future cataclysm, Atwood's people … look back to the dinosaur's prophetic tale. Although nobody knows exactly why the giant lizzards didn't make it, Life Before Man posits the notion that obsolescence may simply be built into the process of life. ...

[Life Before Man] has a subtly documentary air, like the best kind of women's journalism or the most sympathetic case notes. Events are precisely dated. Canadian social structure, domestic interiors, street habits are inconspicuously documented…. Yet the writing is not pedestrian. The novelist is also a poet; one is reminded of this not by her lyricism but by her precision, as when Nate at a party stares down the meaningless cleavage of a meaningless girl: "He watches this pinched lands...