Snapshots: Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder

I just finished a Margaret Atwood reading spree and felt the need to share. I recently read three Atwood books: probably her most famous book, the dystopian satire (not a funny satire, but the so-biting-it-makes-you-cringe kind) The Handmaid’s Tale, The Penelopiad, a reworking of Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of the ghosts of Penelope and her twelve murdered handmaids, and the short-story collection Moral Disorder. While all three of the books were well worth reading, surprisingly, it’s Moral Disorder that stuck to my ribs the way a really satisfying book does sometimes. Though it didn’t unseat The Blind Assassin, one of my all-time favorite contemporary novels, as my favorite work of Atwood’s books that I’ve read so far, I found Moral Disorder an engrossing, emotional, and vivid read, and Atwood plays with unique story structures here as she did so successfully and intriguingly in The Blind Assassin. Even though the book is technically a short story collection, it’s really a hybrid of a short story collection and a novel. All the stories deal with the same main character, Nell, and relate scenes and anecdotes from Nell’s childhood, years of wandering, affair with a married man, marriage, and life with her aging parents in not-quite chronological order.

Most short story collections are designed so readers can jump around and read the stories in any order, but Atwood’s collection is really one that needs to be read from start to finish to feel the full effect. The only drawback to the unique structure of this collection is that it’s hard for me to separate out the different plot threads clearly enough in my mind to pick out favorite stories. “The Bad News,” the first story in the book but probably one of the last chronologically, was a highlight because of its honest depiction of an aging couple who’ve lived together for a long time, who love each other but can still be annoyed or disheartened by the other’s tics and habits. Because of its out-of-chronology position in the book, it also colors the later stories about Nell’s relationships with men, since you learn who Nell ends up with in the end right here at the start. The titular short story, “Moral Disorder,” is another gem, in which Nell and her married lover move to a farm and try (and generally fail) to raise various livestock, with each often bloody failure resonating with Nell’s insecurities at being the ‘other woman.’ “The Entities” features my favorite character in the book, plucky real estate agent and Holocaust-survivor Lillie, who helps Nell find a way to deal with her husband’s first wife. I think my favorite of all, though, is the last story in the collection, “The Boys at the Lab,” which weaves several layers of the past together with the present through the power of storytelling as Nell sits beside her invalid mother’s bedside.

Brief plot summaries don’t do these stories justice, though; what makes them wonderful is how Atwood infuses pathos, humor, and achingly real details into these stories of life in the everyday world. Though I would highly recommend any of Atwood’s books that I’ve read, I really think Moral Disorder deserves an extra bit of praise. Even if you don’t usually read short story collections, give this one a try; you might be pleasantly surprised by it, as I was.