Books: That Consuming Hunger

THE EDIBLE WOMAN by Margaret Atwood. 281 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

PROCEDURES FOR UNDERGROUND by Margaret Atwood. 79 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.75.

"Sensibility" is the word of faint praise that customarily damns women novelists. Yes, they do manage their little nuances so well—those pale violet insights into rather unimportant feelings. Nice sense of humor, too—this side of real bite, though. Still, no man can match them at describing parties—if that's what one really wants in a story. Will women writers, in other words, ever live down one of the world's most overanthologized short...