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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. As the New York Times has noted: "The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations.”
“The Bad News” is set in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. The narrative then switches time as the central character moves through childhood and adolescence in “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” “The Headless Horseman,” and “My Last Duchess.” We follow her into young adulthood in “The Other Place” and then through a complex relationship, traced in four of the stories: “Monopoly,” “Moral Disorder,” “White Horse,” and “The Entities.” The last two stories, "The Labrador Fiasco" and "The Boys at the Lab," deal with the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.
Moral Disorder is fiction, not autobiography; it prefers emotional truths to chronological facts. Nevertheless, not since Cat’s Eye has Margaret Atwood come so close to giving us a glimpse into her own life.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 19, 2006 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780739346389
- File size: 221369 KB
- Duration: 07:41:11
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This book of 11 linked short stories, with it inevitable episodic quality, captures that sense we sometimes have of life being a series of crises and peak experiences, separated by stretches of seeming ordinariness. The incidents come from the life of a woman named Nell over a sixty-year span. On the whole, the stories rely more on the richness of the narrative voice (not always first person) than on the immediacy of dramatized scenes. Susan Denaker's reading shows a good understanding of this trait. Her careful pace facilitates the listener's comprehension of Atwood's prose, and her clear, intelligent narration accords well with this thoughtful, emotionally rich book. G.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine -
July 24, 2006
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. -
September 18, 2006
Denaker's fine, deep voice and varied vocal range works particularly well with Atwood's sardonic humor. But her articulation is so perfect as to be disconcerting, often tossing impediments into Atwood's carefully wrought sentences. The first story begins with an elderly married couple, Tig and Nell, having breakfast and tea while discussing some horrific political murders occurring far away. This is the framework for the family stories to come. Nell's girlhood is dedicated to the tender care and feeding of her difficult sister. She perpetually struggles with the pleasure and resentment of her lifelong role as caregiver to her sister, Tig, his sons, his ex-wife and, finally, her own parents. Her life-like Atwood's book-is "a sock drawer into which a number of disparate things were shoved, a jumble." Apparently personal, perhaps even autobiographical, these stories are knit together by the "moral disorder" Atwood sees in everyone from one generation to the next.
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