Moral Disorder and Other Stories (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: trunk room, Miss Bessie, Headless Horseman, Nell They (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An intriguing patchwork of poignant episodes, Atwood's latest set of stories (after The Tent) chronicles 60 years of a Canadian family, from postwar Toronto to a farm in the present. The opening piece of this novel-in-stories is set in the present and introduces Tig and Nell, married, elderly and facing an uncertain future in a world that has become foreign and hostile. From there, the book casts back to an 11-year-old Nell excitedly knitting garments for her as yet unborn sister, Lizzie, and continues to trace her adolescence and young adulthood; Nell rebels against the stern conventions of her mother's Toronto household, only to rush back home at 28 to help her family deal with Lizzie's schizophrenia. After carving out a "medium-sized niche" as a freelance book editor, Nell meets Oona, a writer, who is bored with her marriage to Tig. Oona has been searching for someone to fill "the position of second wife," and she introduces Nell to Tig. Later in life, Nell takes care of her once vital but now ravaged-by-age parents. Though the episodic approach has its disjointed moments, Atwood provides a memorable mosaic of domestic pain and the surface tension of a troubled family. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

A young writer, like a young woman, has a narrow strip of experience from which to contemplate an unknown future, empty and waiting for its form. An older writer, reminded of mortality by aging knees and dying parents, has the consolation of seeing everything in rich detail, meaningful and apparently pointless together. Moral Disorder is about a whole life, the life of Nell, married to Tig, or Gilbert. It is told in segments, stories concentrating on particular gritty or glittering episodes or problems. It covers every decade from the 1930s to the present. Margaret Atwood balances the apparently random -- disorderly -- events and memories against the sense we all have that a life as a whole has its own shape, possibly a destiny.

Moral Disorder is a perfect title -- apparently one from a novel abandoned by Atwood's husband, which fits. And the work, with its isolated tales, some in the first person, some in the third, is a perfect shape for contemplating life and death. It is like our memories: There are things that persist in refusing to be forgotten, are as clear as the day they happened, whereas all sorts of more apparently significant things vanish into dust or persist only in old newspapers and fashion magazines. A life, unlike a biography, does not unfold in a neat progression. Nor is it entirely incoherent. Each of these stories coheres round a defined patch of Nell's life, and each has its own cluster of brilliantly described and unforgettable things, which are as important as the people.

In "The Art of Cooking and Serving," the 11-year-old Nell is knitting a layette for an unborn sister -- the garments' slight lopsidedness and lumpiness unforgettable -- and reading a book of household advice that gives her a vision of a perfect life ahead, with table centerpieces and housemaids in daytime dress or dressed with black stockings and organdy collar and cuffs for afternoon tea and dinner. In "The Other Place," the young graduate is living in a bedsit with a gilt mirror and a horrible green satin bedspread. In "Monopoly" and in "Moral Disorder" itself, Nell is living with a married man (knitting again) in a ramshackle farm and attached, as one is at that age, to the Earth, which is madly overloaded with too much flesh, feathers, fur, vegetables, pots, pans and rapidly changing seasons. Only Atwood could have written the fat white horse called Gladys and the intransigent lamb (and the abattoir where he ends) with such grim and delicious comedy. Atwood remarks dryly that at that stage, Nell "still thought life on a farm represented some superior form of authenticity."

Houses, too, mark the shape of a life, not least as containers for the memorable things. Tig's ex-wife, Oona -- a 1970s cookery and good-life guru in a caftan, author of Femagician's Box of Tricks -- falls on bad times and needs a manageable house, which Nell, her supplanter, provides. It is discovered by Lillie, a concentration camp survivor turned real estate agent, incurably imaginative about what can be done to hideous or uncomfortable houses. In this house, Oona dies in the kitchen, her son bleeds on the floor breaking in to help her, and Nell calls in a "feng shui friend, who found her an expert in crystals and purification." The "crystal person, whose name was Susan" discovers a "channel where the entities come and go" that has to be purified. The house is sold to two gay men, who mistake the entities for "aunties" and find it all funny. Nell thinks about the "entities," which can be seen as shorthand for the things and memories from which Atwood has movingly and artfully constructed her book.

"All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood," she writes. "I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same."

I understood only slowly how integral to the whole book was the contrast between blood, pain, sickness and death and those visions of a planned future purveyed by household advice, television images, children's stories. The child Nell had a book in which the ideal home with the ideal mother had white frilly curtains that haunt her as something that must be in the future until they are tried and found impractical. Nell, in a lopsided, ungainly and morally disordered way, does attach herself to the human community of men, women, children and work. But she has a recurrent dream, all her life, of the "other place," a place still haunted by the gilt mirror and the "green satin bedspread, which has taken on a life of its own and is able to morph into cushions, or sofas, or armchairs, or even -- once -- a hammock." In this dream, like the hero of Henry James's chilling "The Beast in the Jungle," whose doom is to be the only human to whom nothing happens, she understands: "I'll have to be all by myself, forever. I've missed the life that was supposed to be mine." And she is aware, in a room she hasn't yet entered, of an imprisoned child.

"We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on," says Prospero, "And our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep." Moral Disorder is cunningly constructed of the vagaries of memory and is rounded by Alzheimer's and forgetting. Nell, Tig and Nell's sister test themselves for failing memory as they ruefully allow for failing knees. There is a moving, evocative story of Nell's father, after a stroke, inhabiting a story Nell reads to him, of three explorers disastrously astray in Labrador. There is a plain and very sad tale of Nell's mother, reduced to immobility, her memories slipping away, though living on, briefly, in a different form, in Nell's own memories. The mother dreams a repeating dream of being lost, and no one, no thing, being there, only the empty sky and a logjam she tries to climb. This tale, like all these tales, is both grim and delightful, because it is triumphantly understood and excellently written.

Reviewed by A.S. Byatt
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385721641
• ISBN-13: 978-0385721646
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #97,745 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Readers Heaven, January 3, 2007

By	G. E. Melone "lit lover" (Katoomba, New South Wales Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Moral Disorder: and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Margaret Attwood has to be the most brilliant writer of our time. Her descriptive brilliance penetrates deep into your soul as her words take wing. Her latest work, Moral Disorder, continues the high standard of her other works such as Cat's Eye, Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. No matter what genre she dips into, the results are astounding.
This book of short stories, are all connected through the lives of the women of one family. They could be read separately, but together each story adds to the family portrait giving the reader a panoramic view of the three central characters of the book- mother and two daughters.
The way Margaret Attwood describes a daughter trying to get through to her aging mother, lost in reverie or some other country in her mind, makes you want to weep. Her prose is exquisite.
I have never ever never been disappointed with a Margaret Attwood piece and this one is no exception.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant, tantalizing, and slightly mysterious collection of short stories, October 27, 2006

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moral Disorder: and Other Stories (Hardcover)

A good friend of mine is also an incurable Margaret Atwood "fan" and has reminded me yet again of our shared benign affliction, craving assurance that she still has first dibs on MORAL DISORDER the moment I've soaked up the last word of the last paragraph of the last story. "Buy it yourself," I chide her over tea. "We have to support Canadian authors."

"But it's Margaret who supports us!" she exclaims in mock surprise at my naiveté. And once again we marvel at how succinctly, elegantly and inexhaustibly Atwood keeps on revealing "our" ordinary little stories, bares (and bears) "our" secret little griefs and anxieties, and gives wry sincerity to "our" hopes and aspirations, no matter how tangled and threadbare they may seem.

"Our," of course, refers to the collective and peculiar cultural condition known as being Canadian. It matters not one iota to our national great lady of fiction (both short and long) that most of her readers live well south of the fabled 49th Parallel and that we are no more The Great White North than Wal-Mart. For Atwood, mere geography is simultaneously nothing and everything; in her tales, the terrain of the human heart and its myriad tributaries of experience and feeling are the truly renewable natural resources. Or, as my hungry-to-borrow friend puts it, Margaret Atwood can turn a tired and mundane junk-mail idea --- sibling rivalry, common-law couples, hobby farming, teenage angst --- into soul-stirring literature. Amen to that!

And she does it wholly up to form in MORAL DISORDER, whose rather weighty and officious title is just another of those playful authorial devices that belie this collection's true generosity of spirit. Musing on a rainy afternoon, the friend and I decide over our second cup of tea that the book's chosen title could have mimicked any of the 11 lightly connected tales between its covers. How about "The Entities," "White Horse," "The Other Place," "The Labrador Fiasco," or (my personal favorite) "The Art of Cooking and Serving"?

Each title presents itself as tantalizing, slightly mysterious, and ready to give you more than expected, while still keeping back a few secrets of its own. And that strikes me as being quintessentially Atwood. At each turn in the fictional trail she scratches down through an artfully assembled patchwork of characters, relationships and events to show the persistence and poignancy of truth just below the surface.

MORAL DISORDER is good for a week of rainy afternoons, and more. Although we Canadians are known for being generous, my advice is: Don't be too quick to loan this latest Atwood gem out. It's truly a "keeper."

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch [..]

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Tour into the Past, October 28, 2006

By	DCSusan (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moral Disorder: and Other Stories (Hardcover)

I bought this book a week ago and finished it yesterday. I wanted to savor each of the stories and not rush through through the book. As a contemporary of Atwood's, I could relate to the periods and relationships she so brilliantly describes. The final story, "The Boys at the Lab," I was able to read on two levels--the description of the decline of the narrator's 90+ mother and recollection (only by photos in an album) of a magical period of her childhood.