Moral Disorder and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood

The Barnes & Noble Review

One of the silliest ideas about the uses of fiction is that it should offer lessons in how one should live. But sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Margaret Atwood manages to cram so much spiky wisdom into her work that sometimes they do seem like a primer in the lives of intellectual women of the 20th century. The stories in Moral Disorder do not quite add up to a novel, nor are they explicitly linked. Some are told in first person; others in third. But taken together, they may comprise the life of one woman, with a husband named Tig and a difficult younger sister, offered up in slices from different decades. The collection begins with a couple in late middle age, juxtaposing the cozy breakfast table togetherness with the daily ritual of absorbing the bad news from the world. Atwood's woman -- called Nell in some of the stories -- grows up with conventional expectations in the '50s, genuinely fascinated with homemaking manuals and knitting a layette set for her much younger sister, for whom she will serve as a nearly surrogate parent. During the '60s and '70s, she is in turn an unmarried scholar, a step-parent, and a second wife living on a rural farm. Atwood's particular genius has always been a lack of squeamishness at showing how women can sabotage each other. This comes out especially well in a section on the "dumb bunnies" of classic literature, told from the viewpoint of a high school girl, and the character of Oona, the purportedly feminist, extremely high maintenance first wife of Nell's husband for whom Nell does several extraordinary favors. Atwood, of course, belongs nowhere near the self-help section, but her characters wrestle with the big problems of daily life with an intellectual intensity that feels nearly instructive. --Amy Benfer

From the Publisher

Atwood triumphs with these dazzling, personal stories in her first collection since Wilderness Tips.

In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences — the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.

In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Washington Post - A. S. Byatt

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.

The New York Times - Alice Truax

One doubts that Atwood herself believes in happy endings because an ending, by its very nature, can't be happy. Inevitable extinction is the private apocalypse we all face. Perhaps that's why in this collection, dedicated to her family, Atwood too has left a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest—"for anyone who might be following, trying to find her." But it isn't these clues that hold us in thrall, or even the particulars of the woman who scattered them; it's the ferocious, fecund intelligence that invented that forest and everything in it—including its wild dogs. Even as Atwood reminds us that her bad news is also our own, the tremendous imaginative power of her fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.

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 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

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 Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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 andpoint 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.

Product Details

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Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss the form and structure of the book. How was your reading affected by the fact that Moral Disorder is neither a novel nor a collection of freestanding stories? What freedoms does this form provide both the author and the reader? What was the impact of the shift in point of view from first person to third person? In what way did these shifts correspond to the shifts in Nell's life?

2. A starred review of Moral Disorder appearing in Kirkus Reviews describes Nell as “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.” What is your understanding of Nell's impulse as a writer? In what way does being a writer shape her approach to the world around her?

3. How did you first interpret Tig's news that “they just killed the leader of the interim governing council” in “The Bad News” [p. 1]? How did you respond to the narrator's frustrated musings on Tig's words and on the violent history of the world?

4. Why does the narrator find Sarah Field Splint's domestic ideals so appealing in “The Art of Cooking and Serving”? How does she feel about the maid shown in the photographs, both in daytime dress and more formal afternoon attire? When you were a teenager, where did you look for role models and fantasies about your future?

5. What accounts for the sisters' tremendous differences in “The Headless Horseman”? How did their mother address these differences? How did their perceptions of her, and of each other, change throughout theirlifetimes?

6. In “My Last Duchess,” what personal woes do the narrator and her boyfriend project onto the poem? Obtain a copy of this Robert Browning classic and read it as a group. Whose interpretation do you favor? Was the duchess a victim, or a tart? Would the count have been concerned about his daughter's fate?

7. What does the narrator want from a home and a city in “The Other Place”? How is she changed by her encounters with Owen?

8. How would you characterize Oona, who is introduced in “Monopoly”? As “governess,” should Nell have let the boys win at games? How did she adapt to the other new worlds to which Tig introduced her?

9. What meaning did you ascribe to the title of the featured story, “Moral Disorder”? Did you think of disorder in terms of disarray, or in terms of a malfunction or medical condition? In the title story, what morality, if any, does Nell find in nature, from the profusion of crops to the demise of the lamb in the ending? How does the title apply to the collection as a whole?

10. Do Lizzie and Gladys share common ground in “White Horse”? What allows Lizzie to become freed from misdiagnosis and saved from attempted suicide? Why couldn't Gladys be rescued?

11. What was the real reason Nell felt compelled to house Oona in “The Entities”? In the closing lines of this story Atwood writes, “In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same” [p. 188]. What entities have you left behind in various houses?

12. In “The Labrador Fiasco,” the story of the doomed explorers sets an ominous tone as the narrator's father copes with life after a stroke. She concludes the story by saying he is right to doubt her skill. What universal emotions are captured here, as parents reach the point of needing their children to become their guides?

13. In “The Boys at the Lab,” we are told that the narrator's mother only allows happy endings. How would you characterize the ending of her story? What is the significance of the book's closing image—the memory of the aristocratic Indian venturing into raw wilderness?

14. Compare Moral Disorder to the Atwood fiction you have read previously. Are there traces of her signature themes, such as dystopia or violated trusts, in these stories? What new territory does this collection chart?

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