Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

I've decided to start adding pictures of the books, if I can acquire images of the correct editions. For example, this is the paperback cover, which is so much more . . . paperbacky than the original cover, as you can see:





Anyway, this book had been waiting patiently for me to read it. At first I thought I didn't have anything to say about it, although I enjoyed it immensely, but as I plumbed deeper into my own thoughts, I realized the exact opposite.

Many of the other books I write about have all this STUFF surrounding them. Of Mice and Men for example, is on the way. There's some amount of clout to them, whether it comes by way of critical recognition or mere shock value. I don't usually look at something, think to myself, "Oh this looks pleasant" and then get right down to it. You can ask Schrodinger's Ball, whose lime green cover and promises of mild intellectual challenges have been collecting dust at the floor near my bookshelf since late March while I passed it over for more frantic flights of fancy, again and again.

I also don't react well to clout, at times. This is why Siddhartha is bound to be neglected for awhile, and so on.

So why pick up Moral Disorder? Lately I've been drawn to short stories - in the past I was skeptical of short stories as art forms, don't ask me why, I guess I just didn't like what felt like a middling ground between poetry and novel. Lately, however, short stories have been all the rage for me.

I know a smattering of Atwood's poems outside of the collection Power Politics, which I know by heart and count as a personal influence in my own creative writings. So I surprise even myself by realizing that it has taken me this long to read any of Atwood's complete sentences. Maybe the titles of her books were just too daunting, or I was afraid I'd be getting into some overly poetical fiction, like I felt about A Spy in the House of Love. Short stories? Nice stopover to decide if I'm actually ready to try tackling the other novel of Atwood's I have sitting around, Surfacing.

Of course, none of this has to do with the book itself. The book is a collection of short stories that all center around one character, sometimes written in first-person, sometimes in third-person, perspective. She is a child in one, an adult in another - she is overshadowed by her parents, but then outlives them. Etc.

Atwood's writing is perfectly opaque. What she presents requires no interpretation, no reliance on outside philosophies, no comparison to other works. She writes so directly that I couldn't help but wonder if I was reading her diary or, at times, long-forgotten entries from my own diary.

This is the sort of thing that I always loved about Bukowski and, not to conflate the two authors AT ALL, Fante: the presentation of facts, both physical and psychological, were so direct as to be impenetrable. "Here," their works would say, and plop a huge heavy metaphor down on the table in front of you, "this is -how it is-." It is refreshing to read something that doesn't require intellectualism to move you.

But the major fault, if you can call it that (which you can't, I only do so for argument's sake), with these writers is that they are MEN. Their views on women and on themselves can help me understand what I would love to call a general "human" mindset, but unfortunately all they fleshed out was a very masculine point of view. Sometimes, it's easy to forget that there are other realities, because female writers can either be extremely feminine and write only of womanly things like flowers and dewdrops and, I don't know, Tampax or whatever. OR, they can try to adopt a more masculine genre, as Ms. Highsmith did. Or, god forbid, they can go in for Chick Lit.

It's an old feminist cry: women cannot be humans the way men can. Men have already set the standard for what is human, what is human experience. In a way, they have done so with books as well. We can choose the male authors who are most sympathetic or reverent of women, or we can go for Virginia Woolf, whose very sentence structure contains the sort of convoluted psychological and emotional superfluity that men are always ragging on women for. Don't get me wrong, I fucking LOVE Virginia Woolf, but she's not "practical" in getting the facts of the story across. The plot, like for many women, is all in her head.

In other words, how can a woman write a woman's life without just being either a reactionary or a lackey to masculine writing? Can she? What are her options? And then what are mine as a female reader in this situation?

What am I going to do to see my life reflected back upon me? Read The Devil Wears Prada? Try to find some modern parables in Jane Austen? What about ME, the intellectual, sexual, observant, creative modern woman who takes herself far too seriously but is still worthy of the respect of practical-minded folk?

There is a story in psychoanalytic circles of a patient who did not know she was cold until given a blanket. I think Atwood's prose might be my blanket.

These stories are just about life. They are about being an educated but earthy woman, a human being, a collection of memories, hopes, dreams, comparisons, imaginings. The actual subjects almost sound ridiculous: the protagonist remembers knitting for her baby sister, she remembers an overly elaborate Halloween costume she made that went unappreciated, she tells us the story of breaking up with a boyfriend while trying to study for an upcoming exam on Browning's "My Last Duchess." She recalls living alone, living domestically, caring for her parents, being smothered by her parents, etc.

I am reduced to profanities when I try to express how much I liked this. The stories were so real, so resonant. Instead of someone trying to predict how women feel, how life works for them, she just tells you. That's what I mean by opaque. There aren't huge loping metaphors, but there's a dense block of psychological reality nonetheless.

Finally, I felt like someone was talking to me, about me. That is far different from being entertained or informed. I felt connected. I felt the way I want other people to feel when they read whatever it is I may or may not end up writing.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The tagline on the back of my paperback edition of this book reads, "The psychologists would it folie à deux . . ."

This book was recommended to me by a very sharp and intelligent woman who was thrilled to have a chance to "talk shop" to another reader, even while inebriated. She thrust a worn copy of the novel into my hands and I must admit, the cover is very cheesy: a bright purple glove laid out against a flask atop what appears to be a newspaper, with some kind of metal weapon also in frame. Ridiculous. She implored me to pay attention to Highsmith's writing style, as Strangers was mentioned in the context of 1950s crime novels and the recommender wanted me to note what happens to the same story elements while in the hands of a woman.

She did not need to point this out. Highsmith writes with a particular attention to pure psychology - that is, whereas a lot of other writers (male especially) resort to metaphors in order to describe a characters feelings, Highsmith describes them plainly and directly. Of course, those metaphors -- black coffee, empty shell casings, the smell of honeysuckle, a twist in bones, crushing pumpkins -- have helped shape the genre of noir and crime fiction, they have become hallmarks and expectations. There is nothing wrong with them; they are one of the genre's greatest appeals and delights.

However, Highsmith's ability to astutely present the downward spirals of our main characters, Bruno and Guy, makes their world simultaneously realistic and staggeringly unreal. This is really a great effect - one that you might normally expect from reading a romance: two people meet in an unlikely way and around them forms a universe that "normal" rules cannot penetrate.

Oh, you don't know the story? Of course you do, this is a classic, thanks in large part to Hitchcock's film of the same name, which (from my hazy memory) maintains much of the tension but loses the actual psychological fear and desperation involved. Two men meet on a train. One, Guy, is more "like us," you could say. He seems normal, he's having some marital troubles, but he's relatively calm about them, alternately optimistic and nihilistic. It seems normal. On the train, he meets Bruno, who we immediately assume is "the crazy one" - one huge shining pimple on his forehead, a strangely concentrated but distant gaze, a drinking problem, and a tendency to start talking to strangers (how dare he!). Bruno eventually suggests the outline of "the perfect murder" - two strangers meet on a train, each commits a murder "for" the other one. The proposition: Bruno murders Guy's obstinate wife so that Guy can move on with his career and marry his true love, and in exchange Guy murders Bruno's overbearing and unsupportive father so that Bruno's finances can be freed up. The two men have no connection to each other (besides having ridden the same train), so the crimes will, ostensibly, never be solved.

Due to a strange mood and an undue amount of alcohol, it's never clear if Guy actually agrees to this plan, or leads Bruno on in any way, but Bruno moves ahead with the plan and murders Guy's wife.

It's difficult to explain the effect of this book - it's a dance between two minds and dissecting them is impossible without quoting huge sections of the book or ruining fun plot twists. For Bruno and Guy, it's madness at first sight, and the simple idea that Bruno has dragged Guy into this can be dispelled or at least questioned thanks to Highsmith's scientific presentation of each character's mental processes.

Whatever, just read it. There isn't much I can say. The novel results in tunnel-vision, very effective. It drags you along with the characters and makes it difficult to treat the story as something apart from you. Highsmith puts such a fine point on certain psychological developments that you can recognize them in yourself, even though -you've- never arranged murders with some dude you met on the bus. But once you see yourself in Guy, or Bruno, it's hard to turn back. In the same way, once Guy sees himself in Bruno, he simply cannot turn back. Lucky for the reader, the book ends and you can put it away.