Margaret Atwood has long been one of my favorite writers.  She has a great imagination, a keen sense of what drives people to make the decisions that they do and she's got a serious way with words.  She writes with power, sincerity and cuts to the heart of things.

The first book of hers that I read was <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> followed by a number of other novels and later in college I read her haunting short story "Giving Birth"--this is one of the few short stories that I've read and thought: oh my god, she's got it right and was then terrified by her description.

Anyhow, last night I was browsing through the NYT online and started reading an op-ed on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/opinion/22atwood.html" target="_blank">"A Matter of Life and Debt."</a> I didn't pay attention to the author when I started reading.  Then I couldn't stop and when the piece was finished I wanted more and that's when I noticed in italics at then end of the article Margaret Atwood's credentials. I thought to myself: of course this piece was written by Margaret Atwood and then I promptly reread it.

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This morning when I got up to write a post about this article, I learned that everyone else liked reading it too.  Currently it is the second most emailed article on the NYT website.

It's because, she's got it right.  Atwood references Dante's "Divine Comedy," Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," and Warton's "House of Mirth" to illustrate the deep relationship of the debtor and the creditor. These examples remind us of the way that we are all tied together and that the debtor cannot escape the creditor.

What is central, Atwood reminds us is the personal relationship.   It is easier to see this in the literary examples that Atwood relies on but it is true in this current credit crisis as well.  Part of the problem seems to be that we've forgotten the tightly wrought relationship between debt and credit.  The relationship seems have become less personal with the advent of technology but now that the relationship has failed the repercussions are the same.

What is the most powerful to me about this argument is that Atwood moves away from the paradigm that has become pervasive where we blame greedy creditors for the mess that we are currently in.  Instead she is saying: look, we're all implicit in this mess and you cannot separate the creditor from the debtor.  And you know what, she's right.  It's not fair but what we are now experiencing seems to be the market readjusting due to the greed of both debtor and creditor.    When the good times were good it was very easy to look the other way and to not wonder where the money was actually coming from and now that the tides have changed we seem to be looking for someone to blame rather than trying to understand our own role in this whole crazy situation.

Anyhow, thanks Ms. Atwood for giving me a new perspective on the credit crisis.