More than 20 years ago, Margaret Atwood wrote a short story called 'Happy Endings' that presented a series of possible plots that could follow the beginning of 'John and Mary meet'. Finally, the narrator steps in to announce that the only "authentic ending" is death, but that beginnings are much more "fun" and the "in between" is what connoisseurs prefer.
The blurb for this book anxiously declares that "Moral Disorder" is "almost a novel", but it turns out to be much better than just a novel. This is a book that, structurally as well as thematically, invites readers to experience the orderly and disorderly beginnings, endings, and in-betweens of a life.
The stories present incidents from the life of one person. She's the first-person narrator in some stories and 'Nell' in others, who is usually uncertain about what kind of girl or woman she wants to be. An intellectual with pimples on her bum? Or "practical and mundane" like her parents? And how can she determine which role is an impersonation and which is the reality? "A sister pretending to be a monster or a monster pretending to be a sister?" It's hard to tell.
Real time presents "a small window" between the frighteningly predictable plots of "not yet" and the well-worked tales of "back then". Many of the stories in "Moral Disorder" are about "back then" - about growing up. Nell's relationship with her sister and the consequences of falling in love are displayed in this book. Nell is clearly aware of the inevitable gap between how she felt then, how she remembers feeling, and of the temptation to change details to make the events sound more exciting. It is hard to admit that her sister was not a changeling who sucked up her mother's energy rather than simply the owner of a hamster from whom the mother caught a thyroid disease.
One day, Nell notices how beautiful the winter landscape is, but knows that she would never photograph it for her Christmas cards. It was, she says, "beautiful in real life, but too overdone for art." Atwood, too, works hard to circumvent cheap emotion or consolation. These stories are not simply unsentimental; they're rigorously anti-sentimental and, at their darkest, they're also at their funniest.
Atwood’s fierce determination to veer off the well worn romance track is a little bit like a slap on the face or a douse of water. It stings, but it refreshes. The words, as told by Nell, felt almost like she was detached from the stories - just retelling it the way she remembers. The rawness of the words are something that can’t be described out loud - there isn't any extra baggage, no filler words. I had to push through the pages like foliage, never knowing where it was going to take me next.
The book is full of wonderful details - the way in which the narrator, as a teenager, smeared her face with frozen Noxzema face cream before doing her homework (she had a theory that it would "stimulate the blood flow" to her brain); the way in which her sister argues with the drivers of other cars, all of whom she calls Fred; her recipe for "nuts and bolts", a vile-sounding hors d'oeuvre.
There is a total of 11 stories in the novel. When, in the final piece, it emerges that the mother's horse was called Nell, it feels as if we are being gently reminded that this is not a memoir but something made up. Asked in an interview if the book was autobiographical, Atwood replied, "There has to be some blood in the cookie to make the gingerbread person come alive." There's plenty of wit, compassion and grace present in "Moral Disorder."
B.
Edited by: Joey
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