REVIEWING HER DEBUT, SELF HELP, in 1985, Jay McInerney, Lit-It-Boy of the day, said: "Lorrie Moore examines the idea that lives can be improved like golf swings and in so doing finds a distinctive, scalpel-sharp fictional voice that probes, beneath
the ad hoc psychic fix-it programs we devise for ourselves, the depths of our fears and yearnings."
Some years later, Nick Hornby dubbed Moore "the best American writer of her generation". You won't hear me disagreeing, but judge for yourself, for here, at last, is a satisfying collection containing all of the stories from previous anthologies, the four linked tales that eventually took shape as her novella, Anagrams, and three that you'll only have seen if you avidly read the New Yorker magazine. (Though why some fool has tricked the book out to resemble an EasyJet air hostess wearing orange and grey is anyone's guess.)
In her author's note, Moore explains the book's reverse chronology and in doing so, discounts (unfairly, I think) her early work, explaining that newer stories feel closer to who she is. "The older ones seem written by someone else, as early work usually does … clearly written by an illiterate cave woman … the better ones are up front, though they often but not always lack the jaunty, energetic mistakes of youth found aplenty in the back."
Begging to disagree, I deliberately read out of sequence, hopping from early to late and then to her middle period, and suffered no diminishment of pleasure. Yes, the early works call to mind mid-1980s New York, when the popularity of second person narrative spiked, but these wry satires of motivational screeds retain their stylish impact as effortlessly as the best vintage fashion crafted by the finest couturier.
As McInerney correctly observed, Moore's great talent is cutting to the heart of matters, exploring the darkness in a way that defines the phrase black humour. In "Yard Sale", she writes: "The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you're already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you're anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal's office: 'So what's this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?' You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow and your hair to perk up."
In another story, when Mamie hears that tests show she has "pre-cancer", she turns to her doctor and wonders, "Pre-cancer? Isn't that … like life?" Later, contemplating the emotional gulf widening between herself and her husband, she thinks, "At times her marriage seemed like a saint, guillotined and still walking for miles through the city, carrying its head."
A fine and adroit stylist, Moore is fond of wordplay but unlike, say, Kathy Lette, has enough restraint to pull back before inspiring groans of despair. Her frequent use of the exclamation point reminds me of Lucy Ellmann, though she's far less profane. It crops up whenever a character is being deliberately silly, speaking, even if silently, in a comedy voice. It's the literary rim shot, the raised eyebrow. It is not, I hasten to add, the least bit annoying.
Plot is sometimes sketchy. It's not what happens, as much as who it happens to and how they feel about that. Anyway, you don't notice the paucity of outside action because most of her characters live trapped in their own heads, very busy places indeed, where thoughts and epiphanies buffet them ceaselessly.
What lingers, most of all, is how funny Moore is. She has said that "people being funny with each other is … a kind of generosity. And I'm interested in those little moments of generosity." Such moments are usually connected to awkwardness, which is where the tension is – and that, she says, is where the story lies, alongside the humour.
Thus we have the narrator of "How to Be an Other Woman" explaining, "After four movies, three concerts and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events." In "Agnes of Iowa", the eponymous protagonist tells a chic Manhattanite that she's from Iowa and elicits the following condescending response: "She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like a facial exercise. 'No dear,' she said. 'Here we say O-hi-o.' "
The temptation to quote entire, glorious pages is strong, so indulge me a bit longer. In "Starving Again", Moore writes: "(Men] liked to look in the mirror. For women, mirrors were a chore: Women looked, frowned, got out equipment, and went to work." And the cancerous wife of "Real Estate" has this reaction to her philandering husband's latest excuse: " 'Terrence!' Ruth clapped her hands twice, sharply. 'Speak more quickly! I don't have long to live!' They'd been married for 23 years. Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically."
As with any collection, there's the "surfeit of lampreys" threat if you dive in headlong and don't come up for air. Moore does orbit back around familiar themes and situations – illness, death, thwarted relationships, alienation – but arguably these are the fundamental concerns of everyday life, which itself has the habit of repetition. She's not unaware of this, and admitted in one interview that she only realised in hindsight that nearly every story in Birds of America contains a jeopardised child, though most were written before her son was born. The most heart-rending of these, which does hold kernels of autobiography, is entitled "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk". It's a devastatingly raw tale about a child contracting cancer that reduces this reader to tears every damn time.
I remain dazzled by Moore's fancy footwork, humbled by her emotional perspicacity. She'll make you laugh, make you cry, and blast you between the eyes with home truths so complicated and so simple that you'll smack your forehead, saying, "Of course! That's exactly it!" This, to me, is the highest form of flattery you can pay an author.
The full article contains 1046 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
