Granted, I think it’s fair to question, in books like Edan Lepucki’s California or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, why we need to look to the future when religiously-motivated persecution and the politicization of women’s bodies is already a daily reality for thousands of earth’s current inhabitants. (One might also wonder why a Canadian writer like Atwood needs to go further than the present-day U.S. to conceive of consumerist culture as a futuristic nightmare?)

Then again, a subset of these books developed a neat curiosity about how stories of the past (our present) would be told and what conventions would be deemed worth preserving. Lepucki wondered what marriage and child-rearing might become in a dying world, without institutions to either support them or insist on their necessity; St. John Mandel inquired as to whether Shakespeare and classical music would find any function once culturally-enforced class divisions collapse; and Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns posited (correctly) that quotes from The Simpsons will be the foundation on which a new civilization will be reborn after the great crash. Atwood herself got in on this action with Maddaddam (now in development as an HBO series), which capped off the trilogy she’d started in 2003, by imagining the fashion for sustainable food movements enshrined as doctrine. There have been other, usually less engaging, mass extinction novels that didn’t emphasize the role of women, but the commercial apotheosis of the form arrived with the massively successful The Hunger Games young adult series (and the requisite film franchise) and 2015’s exceptional Mad Max: Fury Road, both with female characters front and center.

This is the climate in which The Heart Goes Last appears and part of why its cheekiness comes as some surprise. If dystopian fictions are, as I believe, how we’ve come around to addressing the imbalances of the present, what are we to make of a novel where a hooker gets down with a teddy bear (“Oh, honey. Oh, yes. You’re so soft!”), a minor character abruptly comes clean about her face transplant and why she had it (roller derby accident), and in which, following Charmaine’s mock execution of Stan—which she believes is real—she thinks to herself, and I quote, “Holy shoot”?

Obviously, this is all a bit of a palate cleanser, a lighthearted corrective to the bleakness of the genre, and part of me suspects that other readers might find this book bad, or even terrible, but I don’t think it does anyone any favors to impugn what is triumphantly camp. It is marriage, the ultimate synthesis of structural power, that is Atwood’s subject in The Heart Goes Last. Reversing the roles of husband and wife found in 1950s domestic dramas like Peyton Place, it is Atwood’s Stan who is exploited, discarded, dressed and poised while Charmaine pays for their lifestyle in a workplace that takes the form of her marriage: a prison.

The message Atwood has worked into the novel’s disarming level of inanity is a radical one: namely that the one thing worth preserving in a marriage is a wife’s power to choose. To choose her lovers, her friends and her work and to acknowledge the fluctuations of her heart, however inconvenient those fluctuations are to the status quo, and to differentiate between consent and compulsion, sex and pornography. This becomes most vividly the case near the end, when Charmaine begins to wish for an operation that will force her to desire Stan exclusively and return them to the bliss they knew before Positron, before the combustion of society. The darkness of this desire belies the melodrama that is Atwood’s method. But she seems to understand that such melodrama can confront the reality of marriage with a frankness that is often missing from more infantilizing stories of marriages that can only be happy or unhappy, and in which individuality is a threat to both parties. And so, perhaps even more than its post-apocalyptic peers, The Heart Goes Last a grown-up novel. Its world is our world, and the future it depicts is the present, which is where we will all be spending the rest of our lives.