Lorrie Moore Truths

1. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

I BOUGHT Lorrie Moore’s new collection, Bark at McNally Jackson Books in New York. I was with a friend, and it was snowing that day — the first pretty snow of the season. As we exited the store I flashed her the cover, quickly taking it out of its bag and stuffing it back in, as though flaunting some contraband. The delight was the same.

I was surprised to find I had read half of the short collection before. It was my latest acquisition of what had turned out to be a year-long binge of the author, one which started with Birds of America –passed onto me by a man I was just starting to love, and read buried under the covers in my grandparents’ guest bedroom. It was in the house they had been living in since my mother was a child, a large rambling one on the slopes of Table Mountain. The reason I was staying was because I was helping to pack it up, all three stories of it: wrapping sets of antique dinner plates in bubble wrap and putting labels on cabinets, transferring generations of wedding photos into boxes. They were packing themselves away into a retirement home, my grandmother kept repeating, to avoid being a burden to their children later on.

Moore’s stories seemed to shine the light of the surreal onto my experience, the fiery life of them reflected onto the cool stone of everyday experience, spotlighting its layers of sediment, the thin line between tragedy and comedy, the mundane and the absurd. Here is the character KC, walking through her neighborhood in Wings:“HOSPICE CARE: IT’S NEVER TO SOON TO CALL read a billboard near the coffee shop in what constituted the neighborhood’s commercial roar. Next to it a traffic sign read PASS WITH CARE. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.” I began to see things through the Lorrie lens, like driving into my grandparents’ new home, the “Oasis Retirement Resort.” To see my grandfather, a renaissance man of a bygone Europe, having lived his life surrounded by books and art and German deli foods, now moving to this establishment wedged between a highway and a struggling theme park, a line of wind-beaten palms leading the way to their new apartment in a wing called “Palm Grove,” seemed nothing if not Moore-esque. I was hooked, which meant — strangely — that I was also hooked on my own life, and to what reading Lorrie Moore might reveal about it.

2. There’s always an upside if you look up.

Moore’s stories make boring lives interesting.

I read reams of Birds of Americaout loud to my new boyfriend, even though he had read most of the stories before. When I was in Cambridge later that year, I scavenged her novella, Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?, from my aunt’s bookshelf, consuming it at once, like an oyster. I found the big orange brick of The Collected Stories at Daunt Books in London and bought it for my boyfriend, inscribing the message: for many more hours of reading aloud. This I carried with me to Istanbul, where I was visiting a friend. Here I could not resist opening it, very slightly so as not to ruin its new-book feel, and reading some of the stories out loud to her. The book ended up keeping us company all the way down to Turkey’s east coast, where the spine procured more wrinkles, small grains of sand settling deep within its crevices, small spots of sunblock staining its pages. We read it out loud on a bus with no air conditioning, where a woman told us in Turkish to keep our theatrical voices down. We read it sweating on beaches and at campsites, resting our heads and feet on one another. We read it fluently, and fluidly, laughter pouring out of us like water from a tap. We were able to do so because the characters and their settings (the universities of the Midwest, small towns with parochial inhabitants) seemed so far away. We liked the strong and troubled feminine voices; they were in line with the Alice Walker Womanism of our trip. We laughed at the characters’ dry accounts of grownup life, their piercing wit in the darkest moments of middle age. These stories were fundamentally about unhappiness, and that is what made them funny; they were the disproportionately large questions about life, love and death offset by the petty concerns of the mundane — like a cargo truck with no container. Here is the character Kit trying to reverse the inevitable demise of her marriage with one last family holiday in the Caribbean: “She rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it there and downplay the creases — to appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once looked at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had gotten lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop — the words LA CARIBE emblazoned across every single thing.”

The comic follows the tragic just as Moore, starting with a commonplace truism and using the building blocks of cliché, creates a strange kind of logic that stands large and taut and hilarious with emptiness. “Teaching makes interesting people boring, sure,” KC’s mother tells her while on her deathbed. “But it also makes boring people interesting, so there’s an upside. There’s always an upside if you look up.”

“’Life! It’s a hell of a thing,’” says Kit to her boyfriend.

“’I wouldn’t have voted for it. I wouldn’t have given it any stars. It’s like getting a book with all the sexy passages already underlined. Who wants that?”’ he replies.

A lot of it has to do with an abrupt change in tone, from serious to unserious. “You could lose someone a little and they would still roam the earth,” KC tells herself. “The end of love was one big zombie movie.”

3. Because God is off in some cybercafé, so tired from all those biblical escapades that now he just wants to sit and google himself all day… If he’s not deaf to our cries, he’s certainly deaf in one ear.

Reading Moore now, reading the stories that are new to me –Wings, Referential, Subject to Search and Thank you for having me– is a very different experience from those days of abandon. Perhaps it has to do with living in New York. Being in New York is even more like being inside a Lorrie Moore story. Like Munro, Moore cultivates a repressed kind of language that lends itself well to the short story — the silences and pauses in dialogue; the things left unsaid — but tempers it with the sudden jolts of her tonal U-turns, her dazzling one-liners. “Good evening, she said again, loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger. But there was nothing at all.” The noises of the city, the ends of sentences overheard, mimic this sputter and burst, this staccato quality. I ended up reading all four stories in public places. Reading would be interrupted by the red and blue lights of a police car cruising by. When I looked up from my book, I would see a tattoo’d man sketching, or my gaze would be drawn by a neon sign saying “Eyebrows Half Price,” the fact that it was neon suggesting that they were always half price, hence never half price. The absurd was creeping in. I found myself in a coffee shop while the tables around me filled with nerds from NYC playing board games — quite literally: someone placed a sign on my table that said These tables have been reserved between 7pm and 11pm for NerdNYC’s monthly board game night. That same night I was periodically interrupted by texts from a friend about her imminent breakup.

If my experience of reading Moore before was like raging water, this time it was like short bursts of humor or epiphany, like an old brass tap that was just warming up, sputtering and spurting while life went on around me. Being in New York for three months ages you like ten years in other places. I was older and wiser now, and far away from everyone I love. The distance afforded me during those early reading periods — the distance of youth, of travelling or of being in love — meant that I could indulge the way I did. This time I was a little too close to the source; it sat uncomfortably, the humor making me cringe more than it made me laugh. Her stories are often about feeling completely alone, and it’s easy to feel that way in New York.

It’s not just me. Moore’s latest collection is darker too; her prose seems to have become more sardonic, less laugh-out-loud. Distance plays a role here too, in tragedy as well as comedy. In Subject to Search, for example, a character uses analytical distance to joke about suicide. “He turned his hand into a pistol shape and placed it at his own temple, his thumb miming a trigger. ‘That might only wound.’ she said. ‘It might merely blind you, and then you’d never be able to find a gun again.’” In the same story, a love affair between the two main characters is handled with the distance of the perfect past tense. “’Is this a date, or independent contractors in semi-prearranged collision?’ he had asked just last night, and then spring rain had poured down upon them, shining the concrete, dripping off both their eyeglasses, which they removed, and she had kissed him.” These stories seem filled with the distance of the big city; it is the distance of lonely people on the internet, of bodies pressed up against one another on the subway.

4. Let a babysitter become a bride again.

But there are moments of warmth and sincerity too, the kind that comes with age and watching people die. “It felt important spiritually to go to weddings: to give balance to the wakes and memorial services,” says the narrator of Thank you for having me.“I had turned a hundred Rolodex cards around to their blank sides. So let a babysitter become a bride again. Let her marry over and over. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.”

There is so little time, I thought watching the nerds. There is joy in that.

Photo credit: Olivia Walton

Originally appeared in Prufrock