Friday Fiction: Lorrie Moore

--by Hanje Richards

.
Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories. She writes frequently about failing relationships and terminal illness and is known for her acerbic wit and pithy one-liners. Her stories often take place in the Midwest.
.
Moore is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was awarded an O. Henry Award in 1998 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2004 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.
.
Anagrams - Gerard sits, fully clothed, in his empty bathtub and pines for Benna. Neighbors in the same apartment building, they share a wall, and Gerard listens for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna. And then Benna loves Gerard. She listens to him play piano, she teaches poetry, and she sings at nightclubs. As their relationships ebbs and flows, through reality and imagination, Lorrie Moore paints a captivating, innovative portrait of men and women in love and not in love. The first novel from Lorrie Moore, Anagrams is a revelatory tale of love gained and lost.
.
Birds of America: Stories - A collection of 12 stories notable for their verbal wit and range of intellectual reference. Moore's most typical characters are women in retreat from disappointing relationships or in search of someone or thing to relieve their solitude.
.
One example is the eponymous protagonist of “Agnes of Iowa,” an unhappily married night-school teacher whose longing “to be a citizen of the globe!” is not assuaged by her brief encounter with a visiting South African poet.
.
Another is the “minor movie star” of “Willing,” whose involvement with an auto mechanic can’t repair the unbridgeable distance she's put between herself and other people. Or, in a story “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,” there’s the housewife who mourns her dead cat, is chastened by her husband's understandable exasperation, yet is still gripped by “the mystery of interspecies love.”
.
Moore writes knowingly about family members who tiptoe warily around the edges of loving one another in “Charades,” who discover vulnerability where they had previously seen only dispassionate strength in “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People” or who learn to live, say, with the possibility of a baby dying in “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”
.
Moore’s characters are likeably tough-minded and funny, they invariably manifest a feeling that life is passing too quickly and that we haven't made all the necessary arrangements.

.

Gate at the Stairs - Lorrie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.

.

As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer, has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir.

.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
.
Like Life: Stories - In these eight stories, Lorrie Moore’s characters stumble through their daily existence. Lile Life's men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can’t quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned, or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.

.

Self-Help: Stories - In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.
.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? - A disillusioned, middle-aged woman's remembrance of an ephemeral teenage friendship is triggered by eating cervelles in a Parisian restaurant…

.

While vacationing in Paris, narrator Berie Carr, whose marriage is stuck in a bleakly funny state of suspended collapse, looks back to her girlhood in Horsehearts, an Adirondack tourist town near the Canadian border. There, in the summer of 1972, she was a skinny, 15-year-old misfit who rejected her parents and idolized her sassy, sexually precocious friend Sils, who played Cinderella at a theme park called Storyland where Berie was a cashier.

.

In a series of flashbacks, Berie recounts stealing into bars with Sils; sneaking cigarettes in the shadows of Storyland rides; and how, midway through the summer, she was shipped off to Baptist camp after filching hundreds of dollars from her register to pay for an abortion for Sils. Moore's bitterly funny hymn to vanished adolescence is suffused with droll wordplay, allegorical images of lost innocence and fairy-tale witchery, and a poignant awareness of how life's significant events often prove dismally anticlimactic.