Monday, September 8: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

by Margaret Atwood
Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

A collection of isolated tales, some written in the first person, some in the third person, all contemplating life and death. Like our memories, there are things that refuse to be forgotten, some clear and in focus as the day it happened, where at times the seemingly significant things vanish or are found only in old newspapers and fashion magazines.

Reserve your copy of Moral Disorder and other stories


Links:
Margaret Atwood at Random House Publishers
The Margaret Atwood Society

Reviews:

Booklist Review: /*Starred Review*/

Atwood's brilliant and bracing novels appear apace, yet it's been 15 years since her last short story collection, Wilderness Tips. Atwood now returns to the form in a book of interconnected tales that span the life of a skeptical, stoic, book-loving woman named Nell. Swooping back and forth in time and mordantly assessing everything from fashion to the counterculture to real estate, Atwood touches down to illuminate Nell at age 11, knitting furiously while awaiting the arrival of an unexpected sibling. Lizzie turns out to be an exceedingly anxious child, and their exhausted mother leans too heavily on Nell for help. At once fascinated and repelled by the domestic arts, Nell strives to remain unencumbered during her sojourns as an "itinerate brain" at various universities, fending off married academics until she finally falls for one. Tig's dreadfully imperial wife, mother of his two sons, plagues them even after they flee to a farm, where Tig and Nell live in a fever of hard work and earthy sensuousness. Atwood's meticulous stories exert a powerful centrifugal force, pulling the reader into a whirl of droll cultural analysis and provocative emotional truths. Gimlet-eyed, gingery, and impishly funny, Atwood dissects the inexorable demands of family, the persistence of sexism, the siege of old age, and the complex temperaments of other species (the story about the gift horse is to die for). Shaped by a Darwinian perspective, political astuteness, autobiographical elements, and a profound trust in literature, Atwood's stories evoke humankind's disastrous hubris and phenomenal spirit with empathy and bemusement.

-- Donna Seaman (Reviewed 08-01-2006) (Booklist, vol 102, number 22, p6)

Publishers Weekly Review: 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) --Staff (Reviewed July 24, 2006) (Publishers Weekly, vol 253, issue 29, p32)

Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ This collection of 11 interconnected short stories opens as a Canadian woman named Nell and her longtime partner, Gilbert (known as Tig), face aging together into an uncertain future. Subsequent tales go back into Nell's childhood???spent partly in the Canadian wilderness with her entomologist father???and proceeds through her adolescence and academic career, culminating in a series of teaching and editing positions. The stories also move through North American cities and lovers and Nell's relationship with Tig, his two adolescent sons, and their life on a farm. ???White Horse??? is a strong and evocative account of Nell's relationship with younger sister Lizzie, who is schizophrenic, and with Gladys, a white horse rescued from neglect. The final three tales, ???The Entities,??? ???The Labrador Fiasco,??? and ???The Boys at the Lab,??? bring us full circle to the themes of aging and death, as witnessed by caretakers. In these reflective selections, Atwood, one of North America's most prominent and prolific authors (e.g., The Handmaid's Tale, the Booker Prize???winning The Blind Assassin) turns inward, as autobiographical as she has been to date. The result is alternatively humorous and heart-wrenching, occasionally sardonic and always brutally honest in the depiction of our often contorted relationships with one another, with nature, and with ourselves. Demand will be high. Recommended for all fiction and literature collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]??? Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast -- Jenn B. Stidham (Reviewed August 15, 2006) (Library Journal, vol 131, issue 13, p78)

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ The stages of a woman's life and loves are presented in 11 elegantly linked episodes, in the Booker-winning Canadian author's latest collection.

Atwood (The Tent, Jan. 2006, etc.) mingles omniscient with first-person narrative, moving backward and forward in time through nearly seven decades, to portray her (initially unnamed) sentient protagonist, a freelance journalist and sometime teacher whose eventual commitment to writing seems born of the secrets and evasions into which a lifetime of relationships and responsibilities propels her. We first meet her (in "The Bad News") as an elderly woman who lives with her longtime companion, Gilbert (nicknamed "Tig"), in a menacing imagined future shaped by environmental and political catastrophes and further imperiled by approaching "barbarians." Next, scenes from her childhood disclose complex feelings toward her somewhat distant mother and the younger sister (Lizzie) she's obliged to help raise, and?while garbed for Halloween as "The Headless Horseman"?resentment of Lizzie's increasingly irrational fears and mood swings. The agonies of being a sensitive teen and a socially challenged "brain" are beautifully captured in "My Last Duchess." Then, Nell (finally named, when Atwood shifts into omniscient narration) finds something less than happiness when the aforementioned Tig leaves his flamboyant, demanding wife Oona for her, and Nell's energies are subsumed for years in caring for him, his two sons, the infuriating Oona and, once again, her unstable, possibly schizophrenic sibling. The final stories are concerned with her aging parents' last days and the legacy of photographs, stories and memories that comprise her family's inchoate history and point the way toward a fulfillment perhaps implicit in the jumble of false starts and unresolved commitments that her life has hitherto been.

Crisp prose, vivid detail and imagery and a rich awareness of the unity of human generations, people and animals, and Nell's own exterior and inmost selves, make this one of Atwood's most accessible and engaging works yet.
(Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2006)

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