Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories / Review

Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories

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Week one: melancholy 

John Mullan
Saturday 3 April 2010

A

re all the best short stories melancholy? Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, William Trevor: the specialists in the genre seem drawn to tales of sadness and regret. So it is with Lorrie Moore's stories. Their melancholy seems as much a matter of form as of subject matter – a result of narrative compactness. When Agnes, who teaches night class at a college in a midwestern town, sits with her husband near the end of the story "Agnes of Iowa", the narrative mimics her half-conscious disappointment. "She looked at Joe. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself." The circular logic of that second sentence – with the redundant last phrase – enacts the character's thoughts. The narrative has featured the visit to Agnes's college of a semi-famous South African poet, Beyerbach, and the merest glimmer of mutual allure between him and her. Agnes and Joe have been trying unsuccessfully to have a child; Beyerbach, Agnes discovers, had a son who died. She and the writer meet a couple of times, experience their odd attraction, and nothing else happens. The end of the story, after all, is rapidly approaching.

Curtailment is both a property of the genre and, as here, the subject matter of many of the stories. Hopes are stopped short. In her later stories, from Birds of America, Moore's middle-aged characters are well down the long road of marriage, probably divorce, and certainly disillusion. The short-story form captures an episode or a brief period of time when a sense of loss crystallises. That it should all come to this! And indeed, exasperated exclamation is one of the features of Moore's style, performing the unspoken protests of her protagonists. "You're just not happy in this relationship, are you?" asks Bill's girlfriend Debbie in "Beautiful Grade". "These terms! This talk! Bill is not good at this." In "Real Estate", Ruth, in remission from cancer, suspects the disease is returning. "The body – Jesus, how the body! – took its time." In "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk", a mother whose baby has been diagnosed with a malignant tumour contemplates her own belief in alternative medicine from what now seems "her other life". Once the chemotherapy the doctor plans would have been unthinkable. But that was yesterday. "Chemo? Of course: chemo! Why by all means: chemo. Absolutely! Chemo!""I never want to see any of these people again," says the mother to herself as she leaves the oncology ward. But we will not know whether she and her child must return or not.

This long short story has taken us through the agonies of successive medical consultations and treatments, but also cuts events short. Moore's short stories can span time in painstaking ways. Several track an affair from first interest to first infidelity, covering the time that might fit into a novel. But her narrative form condenses into a short, sometimes bewilderingly short, sequence the events that seem to characterise a life. "Community Life" charts Olena's affair with Nick over a few months. But only a few pages of hampered dialogue separate its beginning and its ending. What holds it together as a narrative is its half-buried refrain – "Olena missed her mother the most" – which suggests that this little amorous drama is not even the point of the story.

Sometimes the compactness of the short story involves a radical dramatic unity, with the events of a single day or evening revealing all we will ever know of a character's life. In "Charades" Therese visits her family for Christmas with her husband, her brother and sister, and their partners. The story lasts only as long as their festive game of charades, in which the resentment of her intellectually competitive siblings is revealed in their quarrels over the game's rules. Therese watches her under-educated husband and thinks "how she loves nobody else in the world even half as much" – a clinching final sentence, except that the story has revealed in passing Therese's casual thoughts about an affair she is having. "It is nothing, except that it is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once in a while, Jesus Christ, she needs that."

"Charades" is narrated in the present tense, like several other stories in this collection, committing itself only to the present episode. In "Beautiful Grade" a 50-something academic takes his unsuitably young, ex-student girlfriend to a new year's eve supper party, determined not to dwell on past failures. "He can live in the present, his newly favourite tense." Yet at the end of the story, in the car home, she tells him of the affairs between the other guests and melancholy surges. "Suddenly, sadness is devouring him." The story ends with him escaping his lover's talk into his own memories of "his private January boyhood", a childhood recollection of his father weeping over his dead sister. There is plenty of weeping in Lorrie Moore's stories, often witnessed or overheard. Lacrimae rerum. But it is narrative form that gives the weight of sadness to these collapses.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

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