You know, I've never really read any Margaret Atwood until today. Maybe that makes me a terrible Canadian, or just a terrible woman, I have no idea. Perhaps because in my formative years, I associated her name with a very literary circle of material (which may or may not be true) and I've never been drawn to the genre. Give me outrageous pulpy high fantasy, or give me death! The more obscure the plot, the better! Social commentary is the wrong sort of puzzle for my brain to unwind!
But I did enjoy this. The woman knows what she's doing. Excellent stuff. So perhaps I need to go pick up another title or two and see if she's consistent.
Regarding the "tell-y" -ness of this story: You know, until I started writing and getting schooled on how to do it better, I didn't even know that "telling" was a thing! And you know what? It still doesn't actually bother me that much. My mind will happily supply the details an author leaves out when they tell me something, and if anything, it makes, for me, a better experience, because the author and my imagination have told the story together.
Telling does need to be done well. Artfully, even. Otherwise, you wind up with "Rocks fall, everyone dies, the end." It might work with an unruly bunch of D&D players, but there's simply too many possibilities for my imagination to lock onto in that type of scenario.
Since I'm way out here on this limb already, I'll put it this way: I have zero problems with a story full of telling, as long as it shows and/or tells me enough information to give my imagination a framework. Stone Mattress is an example of this. Ms. Atwood shows me some things, and tells me some other things, and together her words and my mind generate a kick-ass image of the tale she is telling.
(For the record, I would have murdered his ass too.)
So yeah. Telling. It's what we've been doing with stories since we started--well--telling them. ba dum tsssh
RE: Short Story Review: Stone Mattress, by Margaret Atwood.