Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood

I am one of the few (or I assume it's the few) who still buys hardcover books. Not always, not even frequently; but there are some authors for whom the year-long wait for the paperback is simply intolerable.

So: I saw Moral Disorders listed in Atwood's list of works in the paperback edition of The Penelopeliad that I picked up a few weeks ago; "A new book!" I thought. "I haven't seen it yet. It must be coming out soon."

I saw it the following week at the bookstore across the street from my office, and ... I bought it. Yes. That's right. I couldn't even wait long enough to go home and check the price on-line, then wait for it to come by mail.

None of you need me to tell you that Atwood is brilliant and her books are miracles of construction. I've already pestered some of you with my musings about The Blind Assassin, how much I admire her ability to do a book-within-a-book-within-a-book, and have them all inform each other, and to work a pulp science fiction novel into a literary masterpiece--every time I hear someone say (or write) that she didn't deserve to win the Booker for it, I want to hit them.

I just finished Moral Disorder, a collection of short stories that tells one woman's life, and it was gorgeous. It also made me want to cry, because how did she do it? The entire book is constructed with a flagrant disregard for one of the most-often-repeated pieces of advice for novel writers: end your chapters on a note of suspense. But in a book of short stories, you can't do that; each story needs to be complete on its own, resolve itself. And yet there is a thread of suspense that makes the whole thing hang together and pulls the reader through.

So I'm going to have to read it again to figure out what it was. How did she do it?

Posted by Andrea at September 24, 2006 11:02 AM under Books , Wordsmithery

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