Before I accepted the truth of the disclaimer, I was almost ready to request transfer documents. The University depicted in Atkinson's novel seemed perfectly suited to my tastes-from the eccentric professors who burst into tap dances at the slightest provocation, to the students who "consider it a point of honour never to go to a lecture, and instead live the slow life of a nocturnal sloth, smoking dope, watching television and listening to Led Zeppelin." And then I realized the only reason Atkinson's university sounded so much more tempting than this fair institution was simply the change of scenery and those cute accents Atkinson captures so well in her writing. Otherwise, this fictionalized University of Dundee, circa 1972, is bizarrely and disturbingly reminiscent of Amherst at the turn of the new millennium.
Of course, I exaggerate. I have yet to meet a professor at Amherst who continuously skirts the line between sanity and madness or a student who believes the meaning of life to be: "When you stand on the table you can touch the ceiling." But that may be more from lack of social effort on my part, and not because such students and professors do not exist.
"Emotionally Weird," for all its postmodern quirks and foibles, reads quickly and even a little too simply at times. Ostensibly, the novel revolves around Effie, a student at Dundee, and her college life, interlaced with excerpts from various novels-in-progress that her fellow students are writing. Also, as a stabilizing frame for the Effie narrative that often becomes embroiled in its own kinks, Atkinson introduces the more traditional tale of Nora, who may or may not be Effie's natural mother and who also may or may not be a murderer.
Alongside this we get a whole melange of eccentric characters: Terri, the corn-fed gothic princess whose vampire breath brings a dog back to life; Bob, the perennial slacker whose obsession with Star Trek is matched only by his zest for drugs; Olivia, the sensitive beauty whose affair with a faculty member ends in her suicide (that is, until Nora complains to Effie that this plot twist is too morbid for such a light-hearted book, so Effie writes Olivia back into the story); and the mysterious Ferdinand, whose function in the novel is never fully explained yet who manages to appear at the most inconvenient times to function as the uncalled for and invariably confused "romantic lead."
Atkinson is at her best when describing all this insanity; it is only when she attempts to clearly delineate various narrative strands that she stumbles and almost loses the reader-she resorts to the artificial and amateurish trick of changing the font to indicate shifts in speakers and time periods. Atkinson's gimmick almost works at first, such as when she has Effie's pompous English professor, Archie McCue, speak only in italics. Yet, in the words of Archie himself, this trick ultimately turns out to be "a technique which might be considered emblematic of the essential arbitrariness of all linguistic signifiers." In other words, it is tedious, unreliable and makes for lazy readers.
But Atkinson is far too talented and experienced a writer to let a novel hang solely on its clever hoaxes or catchy stereotypes-there is substance to "Emotionally Weird" that may elude a less careful reader and certainly eluded me the first few times I read the book. Small details such as the use of dialect add refreshing hints of reality that are in turn offset by allusions to magic and mystery. The plot is constantly destabilized, so the reader is always jolted by some new plot twist or character. And the frequent asides from Nora and Professor Cousins inject some badly needed common sense into some of Atkinson's more ludicrous situations.
In one of his rare lucid moments, Archie McCue points out that "perhaps it's not the job of fiction to make sense of the world," and in "Emotionally Weird" Atkinson strives to show that the arbitrariness of fiction cannot come close to encompassing the harshness and uncertainty of the real world.