Moral Disorder [Hardcover]

Margaret Atwood is one of the most widely taught writers in the world today; among those both living and dead, she is second in the United Kingdom only to Shakespeare. Last year I included The Penelopiad in a graduate seminar on genre subversions in Canadian literature, and it was a stellar success. I also surveyed my first year course to see who had previously read Atwood (we were looking at a story by her in a book edited by her). Only a handful of students were familiar with her work, although a larger number displayed an uneasy feeling that she was someone they should know. A poll of my fourth-year literature students indicated that, by that stage in their careers, virtually all had encountered Atwood in one academic context or another. Atwood awareness seems almost a barometer of formal education in the arts.
Yet, clearly, she is not a scholarly construct. Unlike Frederick Philip Grove, who is read and even enjoyed almost entirely within the groves and graves of academe, she is far less dependent on the academy than it is on her. Some writers’ shelf-life is determined by course requirements; others by sensibilities shaped through the curriculum. How many among the laity would be delighting in Ethel Wilson, otherwise; how many would appreciate Kristjana Gunnars’s The Prowler, or Places Far from Ellesmere by Aritha van Herk, both of which are relatively unknown, yet out there in multiple printings. But Atwood is not the beneficiary of the lecture hall; she is the reason the lecture is happening.
We identify with the writer, the authorial persona, when we read Atwood. It is not her characters’ perspectives we share, nor those of the texts, but her own. We think we know her. . ..We enjoy Atwood’s quick yet curmudgeonly wit. We admire her unfaltering capacity for moral outrage. We applaud her feminism, her poststructural bravado, her postcolonialism, her eco-awareness, her social conscience, her capacity to extend our individual and collective consciousness, her Canadianness, her cosmopolitanism. And we admire that no category is adequate-all of them too limiting or arbitrary. Like most of us, only with sly skill and wry humour, she is at the intersection of disparate passions. And she is better able to sort out the disparities to say who it is that we are.
But she also writes about who we are not-we who assume our knowledge is general knowledge, our cultural experience definitive, our attitudes and aptitudes the measures of intrinsic worth. This is particularly so in her latest book, Moral Disorder, which is presented as a collection of interrelated stories. It is actually a subversive novel; the text resonates with awareness of the differences between people who live within language and those for whom it is useful-language as environment, language as instrument. One whole chapter, or story, is devoted to readings of “My Last Duchess”. The young protagonist explores Browning’s lines like a diver inside the remnants of a mystery shipwreck. Her boyfriend, similarly preparing for the Grade Thirteen Departmentals, prods at the beams and bulkheads for meaning as they collapse all around him. The protagonist, drifting through the poem, struggles between what she knows, empirically, and what she is supposed to know. She is caught up with herself in Browning’s words; experience of the poem has become part of her life. Her boyfriend is interested in what he can bring to the surface, a few souvenir memories to get him though the exam. They break up.
But-and it is a significant but-the boyfriend is not dissed so much as dismissed. The protagonist, invested with authorial consciousness, is more the object of ironically affectionate mockery. This is about growing up among words from the perspective of an exceptionally articulate sensibility. The boyfriend is simply acknowledged as a context, a necessary mirror. The narrative is not about him, after all. It is about writers and readers, about us.
As usual with Atwood, the authorial voice is what enthralls us-mordant quips abound about the “sloppy consequences” of a fecund marriage, about a brother “heading off to a camp for boys, to do things with axes in the woods,” about the “persistence of material objects” as an appalling irritant in confronting old age. But in Moral Disorder a sense of otherness comes to the fore, almost an urgency to recognise that not everyone lives in the same dimension. There are parallel worlds adjoining our own, in which the story of the Headless Horseman, if known at all, has more to do with a Johnny Depp movie than with Washington Irving. Not since The Handmaid’s Tale has Atwood focused so relentlessly on the capacity for language to connect or to divide, to isolate as well as illuminate. But here there is no dystopia-merely parallelism; no judgement, just difference. It is a mature vision, without condescension, and strangely inclusive.
Atwood has always subverted the reader’s ‘educated’ expectations. The Penelopiad spins on exhilarating anachronisms. Homer has never been better nor so irreverently served. The snippets that make up The Tent, like those in Murder in the Dark and Good Bones, defiantly ignore generic conventions. Like notes written during the night between dreams, they offer lovely moments in a writer’s mind that crystallise the anarchy of creation. Moral Disorder plays with the established mode of linked stories, nearly perfected by Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, to provide the structure for a fractured novel of particularly haunting and engaging beauty.
The characters move from one episode to the next, following a progression shaped by the protagonist’s life. In the first person, she has no name. In the third person, she is Nell. In the first person, Nell is a horse. In the beginning she morphs from the present into a patrician provincial during the fall of Rome; in the end, she moves with her father, more dead than alive, in and out of the deadly Leonidas Hubbard misadventures (with no mention of Mina Hubbard, who survived without incident a replication of the Labrador adventure that killed her husband). Between these events, a girl grows up, remembered by the woman she becomes; also, a relationship grows up, and parents grow old. Meanwhile, words surround everything, literary allusions create authenticity, and cultural allusions give shape and dimension. Like time-lapse photographs of Picasso sketching with a penlight in the dark, the effect is both revealing and concealing. In the end, images in the reader’s mind coalesce into an autobiographical persona as real as any in literature, more real, perhaps, than most in life.
And simultaneously, Atwood affirms that other world, where words are only words and literature was a subject in school. As a narrative and thematic subtext in Moral Disorder, she seems intent on creating a constellation of vanishing points, where parallel worlds converge. You can imagine her skimming through diving manuals which are engaged in the calculation of gas partial pressure at the molecular level and finding the offences against diction not inexplicable anomalies, but merely sources of engagement. It is different for me. When I read that one might descend into “discourse”, when what is meant is discord, or that one uses an “infamous” regulator, instead of a famous one, and that one is to ignore “simplistic” procedures and the “advise”, meaning advice, of divemasters, I cringe. I don’t think-if the personality open to the reader in Moral Disorder is evidence-that Margaret Atwood would. She might actually be tempted to tell a good story about diving and language. And my world would once again be enhanced.
John Moss (Books in Canada)

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)
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