"Moral Disorder" by Margaret Atwood
(Anchor, ISBN 9780385721646, $13.95)
Margaret Atwood's latest fiction arrives new in paperback this week: It's a
cycle of short stories set from the 1930s to the present day, stories which
cohere into a gestalt novel that tell the full and indefinite story of a
woman's life. Seen from outside and in, third person and first, the arc of
her days, her family and career, are a jumble-box of bright memories and
sharp, unavoidable moments that never lose their power or their edge.
Atwood begins quickly, showing us her character Nell in old age and in
childhood. In "The Bad News" Nell struggles to hold back the press of
morning headlines--at least until after breakfast. Digesting her bulletins,
she marvels at her husband's lesser capacity "to absorb, to cushion, to turn
the calories of bad news... into the substance of his own body." That feat
seems to have been her perennial task even from a young age. "The Art of
Cooking and Serving" finds Nell-the-eleven-year-old knitting in anticipation
of a baby sister. It's only after the birth that she divulges her resentment
for having to care both for her parents and for the new arrival.
Nell revisits the roles of sister, mother, and caretaker repeatedly over the
years. Through adolescence and into adulthood, she keeps one eye on her
sister's health, her diagnosis with mental illness. Nell marries a man and
finds herself somehow, implausibly, in charge of his life in addition to her
own; his ex-wife and his children are Nell's responsibility and sometimes
her joy. Though city-born, she and her husband buy a farm, hoping to find in
it "some superior form of authenticity."
In these recounted days and lights, Atwood returns often to the contrast
between the tidy hopes regularly sold to us and the mucky realities we
actually receive. Nell the child pores over ladies' magazines filled with
ideal homes, perfect mothers, and white lace curtains. As an adult, she
edits advice books, raises and slaughters livestock for food, and cares for
her failing parents. Her divided spheres--the imagined one so clean and
planned, the real one open to the dirt of sickness and death--pull Nell
between them throughout her life.
Atwood's other dominant force here is the power of memory, with all its
vagaries and hindsight auguries. In telling Nell's stories, she does not
tell us all, and what she does divulge is not always offered openly. Tales
of Nell's youth and old age come to us in Nell's own voice, first person,
while those of her middle years are narrated from outside by an omniscient
speaker who shows us the flaws and chinks in Nell's recollections: for one
thing, her husband was someone else's husband first, and Nell seems to have
claimed him before that woman was quite finished being married to him. In
this way, we learn, slowly, that Nell's recollections can't always be
trusted.
Memory is spiky and imperfect, like the human heart, but it is at the core
of everything we are. Nell's story and Atwood's book depend on and exploit
the tenacious fragility of memory, with its odd comforts, loops, and
deceptions.
If you love short stories, you should read "Moral Disorder" and be amazed at
what linked stories can do in the hands of a master; and if usually you
would shun a story collection, well, just clap your hands and read this book
as a novel. Either way, Atwood's work will shine, and you will have no
regrets for having peered into the jumble-box.
Review by
Mark David
Bradshaw, February 14, 2008
Back
to Reviews
