Margaret Atwood has been publishing a lot lately. “The Tent,” a collection of essays and vignettes, appeared last winter, as did “The Penelopiad,” a contribution to Canongate’s Myths Series. Her new collection, “A Moral Disorder” (Nan A. Talese, 225 pages, $23.95), continues this run of interesting but slight ventures. It does not approach the awardwinning heights of “The Blind Assassin,” nor is it one of Ms. Atwood’s sci-fi social commentaries, such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Oryx and Crake.”

The stories are interconnected, but mysteriously so. The jumble of scenes suggests something like Ms. Atwood’s sentimental education in an imagined autobiography. One story might eschew names, using only phrases like “my mother” or “my sister.” The next story might follow immediately on the events of the first, or it might leap 20 years into the future or the past, even offering the reader a few crumbs of genealogical information, perhaps a few Christian names. The effect is suspenseful: By the end of the collection, the reader’s sense of the central character has been repeatedly jostled and adjusted and emerges like the answer to a muddled-through math problem.

Still, it would be tricky to draw the heroine’s family tree. But the tenor of the genealogy can be stated from almost the beginning: A few generations in a complicated but quotidian family, with weakening parents and troubled daughters, are observed by a female who makes Ms. Atwood’s famous deadpan voice sound especially down to earth. Some of the countryside voices in William Trevor’s stories come to mind, as do several of the stories from Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Dead Fish Museum.”

The coziness of tone, in some of these stories, heightens a claustrophobic effect.This family’s troubles always happen in homes, often slightly crooked ones.The middle of the collection, a continuous four-story sequence, sees Tig and Nell move out to the country, where Tig enters them into a life of animal husbandry centered on a dark and unromantically haunted farmhouse. Their interactions with the locals are refreshingly free of the sociopolitical edginess that obsesses most American writers who find a farmer or two to goggle at: These Canadians are secular.

Instead, Ms. Atwood takes a page from Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pecuchet.” Flaubert sends his two Parisians into a countryside teeming, for them, with every kind of scientific research available to two hapless autodidacts in the 19th century. The countryside greets them only with folly.

Ms. Atwood’s angle is considerably more modest. Her Tig buys livestock, Ms. Atwood makes you think, because he wants to fit in with old men who drink coffee at the gas station, because he wants to do farming. He loves Nell but doesn’t really see her: Nell didn’t ask for the animals, and has to learn to suffer them.

Unlike Flaubert, Ms. Atwood imparts her characters with the dignity of people who can change. The rhetoric of these realistic people, however, can be awfully literary. After Nell’s favorite lamb is butchered, she decides to face up to the grisly nature of farm life:

Maybe she would grow cunning, up here on the farm. Maybe she would absorb some of the darkness, which might not be darkness at all but only knowledge. She would turn into a woman others came to for advice. She would be called in emergencies. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

This paragraph recalls Ms. Atwood’s classical streak, the relish for primal violence and the resulting psychological opportunities that made Jeanette Winterson such an apt pairing, with Ms. Atwood, in the inauguration of the Cannongate Myths series. But this paragraph also demonstrates the disappointing laziness sometimes on show in this collection: Its characters simply arc through their arcs, hastily transitioning from perplexity to grace.

In some of the more self-contained stories, which are also more autobiographical in content, these arcs feel nicely universal. They concern archetypal moments in school and with siblings. For example, in “My Last Duchess,” a story of high school rites, a young woman crosses a football field: “After school I walked home across the football field, a locale that had once been frightening to me, and forbidden, and significant in some way I couldn’t define, but which had now shrunk to an irrelevant stretch of muddy grass.”

Perhaps only Ms. Atwood could strike just this note of fairy-tale darkness, developmental nostalgia, and, in the last clause, good-natured bitterness. “Moral Disorder” does not break new ground, but fans of Ms. Atwood will find much here to maintain their loyalty.

blytal@nysun.com