Nell’s 92-year-old mother began to lose her eyesight a few years ago. Then she started falling. Later she became stone-deaf in one ear. Now, she’s rebelled against “these sources of misery” and has retreated to her bed.
So Nell sits down beside her, turns her head so that her good ear is exposed, and tells her stories. These stories aren’t just any stories; they’re stories whose purpose is to call a dying mother back to life.
A Scheherazade-like take on Canadian family life in the 20th century, Margaret Atwood’s latest book, “Moral Disorder,” probes the dynamics of familial love, focusing primarily on the convoluted relationship between Nell and her mother.
Atwood, an internationally acclaimed Canadian author, has won numerous literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize, 2000, for her novel, “The Blind Assassin.” She has written more than 40 books of poetry, fiction and critical essays.
These nearly perfect 11 short stories showcase Atwood’s ability to describe intuitive states of mind and her almost visceral feel for language. One especially vivid moment occurs as Nell tries to recall images of her mother: “Her face has had so many later versions of itself laid down on it, like sediments, that I can’t seem to recover that other, earlier face. Even the photos of her don’t correspond to anything I can recall. I remember her essence, however; her voice, what she smelled like, what it felt like to lean up against her, the reassuring clatter she would make in the kitchen.”
Poetic, episodic, discursive and autobiographical, the stories take as their subjects: Nell, her mother and father, her older brother and her younger sister. All are roughly the same ages as Atwood’s family. They live in Quebec and Toronto but summer in Canadian bush country, so the entomologist father can perform scientific experiments. And, like Atwood, a grown-up Nell writes and teaches while living on a farm with her partner. So when Nell describes planting pole beans or having to slaughter a lamb, her words ring with authenticity.
Covering about 60 years from the end of World War II, the book spans Nell’s girlhood, adolescence and adulthood. The stories generally include her mother, even if she’s off stage. They make the mother smile and add details to the narratives, which she does although now she can only “manage a sentence or two.”
Like commentaries on snapshots in the family photo album, the stories add substance, body and sometimes soul to names and dates. They also offer an inside look at the faces, explaining what an expression – facial or verbal – means. With their attention to the fine details of language and life, the narratives capture the fluid quality of time, making them seem more like a memoir than fiction.
Questions appear in the stories, as in: “Do you remember Cam and Rey?” for the mother to answer. There are spaces for mother or daughter to add or refine information. And there are pleasant endings or no endings because the mother dislikes sad stories, especially if they have unhappy endings.
That’s not to say that the stories don’t contain problems. They do. They range from Nell’s feeling somewhat lost as she spends the summer in the Canadian wilderness; to Nell’s coping with her sister’s mood swings; to Nell living on a farm with Tig, a married man, and being on the outs with her parents for doing so; to Nell’s complex friendship with Oona, Tig’s wife; to Nell trying to hold on to her frail parents, as they near death.
Atwood writes with vivid images, some funny, some ironic, some tender: “the pudgy or rancid elderly men,” who try to seduce a youthful Nell; “the intellectual women with pimples on their bums”; Nell’s father watching his wife, afraid that if he lets her slip from his sight, she’ll vanish forever.
If there’s an overriding theme in this richly layered collection, it’s the messiness of familial love – not necessarily a hot topic, but certainly an enduring one. As Atwood skillfully portrays it in all but the first story, which seems less focused than the rest and feels forced, familial love is shape-shifting with tenderness, toughness, insights and insults, appearing, disappearing, and all rolled into one.
Here are some examples:
Eleven-year-old Nell knits a layette for her baby sister to-be. The layette would be a tribute to her goodwill and kindness, she thinks, not yet realizing that “it might be a substitute for them.”
Thirteen-year-old Nell is angry at being forced to help her mom with a cranky baby and angrily lashes out, “‘Why should I (put the baby to sleep)?’ I said. ‘She’s not my baby. I didn’t have her. You did.’ I’d never said anything this rude to her. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I knew I’d gone too far.”
An adult Nell talks to Lizzie, her now grown baby sister. They talk in shorthand, skipping words – because the other can fill them in – and infusing words with extra meanings. “‘Them’ meant their parents, in whose books – outdated, prudish books – only cheap, trashy women did things like living with married men.”
A middle-aged Nell notices that her mother has become frailer. Or as she puts it, her mother has been getting “fainter – more papery, more and more whispery.”
“After you’re ninety, you age ten years for every year,” the mother informs her daughter.
All of which suggests the primary conflict in this book: How to keep death at bay. Providing the underpinning from which the other narratives evolve, the final and most evocative story in the collection shows Nell asking questions almost as if she is trying to become a little girl in order to keep her mother connected to life.
“‘What year was it,”‘ the daughter asks the mother. “‘Was it during the War? Was I born yet?”‘ But – adding to the pathos – the mother cannot remember.
Still the daughter tries. So she tells stories – these simple yet profoundly moving stories. Otherwise, the elderly woman will lie in bed with her eyes closed and her good ear on the pillow – closed off from her surroundings. She will sink back inside herself where Nell cannot reach her.
Diane Scharper, a member of The National Book Critics Circle and a professor of English at Towson University, is editing a collection of memoirs.
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Moral Disorder
By Margaret Atwood
Doubleday, 240 pages, $24.95
