Canonical babbling
Christopher Tayler admires Lorrie Moore, an author who, in The Collected Stories, combines humour with pathos and insight
The Collected Stories
by Lorrie Moore
656pp, Faber, £20
Christopher Tayler
Saturday 10 May 2008
In "Debarking", one of the newish pieces gathered for the first time in Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories, an emotionally bruised, freshly divorced man called Ira starts dating Zora, a longer-term divorcee. Zora is very beautiful, a paediatrician, and while she appears to be subject to mood swings, Ira finds her unpredictable behaviour strangely liberating. "I've never seen a paediatrician smoke hashish before," he notes. Soon, though, her hobbies - carving sculptures of naked boys with alarmingly taut buttocks and holes drilled through their penises; wrestling lustily with her teenage son - set off alarm bells. "Watch this," she says one evening, then fires a collapsible umbrella outwards from her crotch "like a cartoon erection". And later, over dinner in a candlelit restaurant, she refers dismissively in passing to her "nervous breakdown". Here, Moore writes, "she raised two fingers, to do quotation marks, but all of her fingers inadvertently sprang up and her hands clawed the air". Ira isn't sure what to say.
Moments of this kind, combining exuberant humour, sudden social discomfort and unvoiced desperation, all held together by Moore's carefully throwaway delivery, come thick and fast in these stories. The stupefactions and miseries caused by illnesses, bereavements, divorces and stalled marriages often give rise to a kind of deeply felt clowning that's not like much else in contemporary American fiction. One character sets her hair spectacularly on fire while blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Another deliberately splats herself in the face with a lemon meringue pie. Moore also supplies a steady stream of jokes, nearly all of them good and some fairly dark. (A phone discussion of suicide methods: "I can't go into too much detail, because - Hi, honey! - the kids are here now in the room. But I'll spell out the general idea: R-O-P-E.") At her best, she manages to be very funny while delivering impressive quantities of pathos and insight, a trick she pulls off without being glib or covertly sentimental.
In this respect, her much anthologised story "People Like That Are The Only People Here", first published in the New Yorker and then in Birds of America (1998), sets the bar scarily high. Subtitled "Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk", a deceptively jaunty-looking reference to paediatric oncology, it's also unusual among Moore's writings in inviting the reader to guess that it's autobiographical. A writer who's referred to only as "the Mother" comes across a blood clot in her baby's nappy. It looks "like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow". Mother, husband and baby are instantly plunged into the world of Peed Onk and the Tiny Tim Lounge, "whisked away to another planet: one of bald-headed little boys". In tears, the husband advises: "Take notes. We are going to need the money." The mother replies that she can write "quasi-amusing phone dialogue . . . But this? Our baby with cancer?" A helplessly witty, honest and unbelievably affecting journey through American health care ensues. The story's admonitory closing lines: "These are the notes. Now where is the money?"
Not surprisingly, Moore's earliest stories can seem overworked and slightly gimmicky in comparison, although most of her trademark interests - including cancer - are in place from the beginning. The pieces that appeared in her first collection, Self Help (1985), make eye-catching use of the imperative mood in imitation of, well, self-help books. "Understand that your cat is a whore and can't help you," one of them begins. This is still enjoyable, as is the somewhat undigested influence of Woody Allen's comic prose that's on display in such stories as "How to Become a Writer": "Decide faces are important. Write a villanelle about pores." (Allen tributes continue up to "Vissi d'Arte", from Like Life (1990), in which a struggling New York playwright builds a sprawling magnum opus around the death of his great-aunt Flora, "whose dying word had been 'Cripes.'") But while they clearly weren't "written by an illiterate cave woman", which is what Moore suggests in her introduction, these stories sometimes lay on the rhetoric too thickly or strain for symbolic effects.
When her characters start moving to the Midwest, however, everything falls mysteriously into place as her satiric eye turns fondly to that "faraway land" where there are "gyms but no irony or coffee shops" and the young are "spacey with oestrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese". Moore, who has lived and taught in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1984, sometimes lets her characters grow impatient with the provinces. A woman who's frustrated by life in Iowa bemoans "the oblique and tired way history situated itself there - if ever". Yet it turns out that history can be glimpsed from such places: "Beautiful Grade" touches on the Bosnian war, guilt over racism is addressed in "Agnes of Iowa", and the characters in the newer stories brood constantly on Iraq. Moore also has a sharp line in social observation - "Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself" - and an endless interest in people's ways "of not knowing each other at all".
At the beginning of the book, Moore says that she's "not terribly prolific". Even so, her three collections, supplemented by four tales scooped up from her novel Anagrams (1986), and three from the New Yorker, add up to a pretty substantial Collected Stories. The book is arranged in reverse chronological order; as Moore says of the stories, "the better ones are up front", which means that some readers might feel insufficiently rewarded after the first 500 pages or so. On the other hand, Moore is only 51, and on the evidence of the recent writings assembled here, most readers will hope that this sizeable volume will need to be expanded one day. Although her characters have a way of blurting out one-liners whenever they're feeling defensive or bitter, her own humour doesn't sell their deeper emotions short. You feel bad for Zora, chewed up by love for her son, when Ira tells her he'll call tomorrow, "though he knew he wouldn't". As someone says in another story: "Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one."
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