C10| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BYELIZABETHWINKLER
I
N THE 1980S,Elizabeth
Tallent had as auspicious
a debut as a young
writer could hope for.
Her stories were pub-
lished in the New Yorker and,
before she was 30, collected in
her first book, “In Constant
Flight” (1983). A novel and two
more collections swiftly fol-
lowed, all widely acclaimed.
Then, for 22 years, she went
silent, her writing crippled by
her debilitating perfectionism.
“I took a voice, my own, and
twisted until mischance and
error and experiment were
wrung from it, and with them
any chance of aliveness—stories
thrive on exactly those risks per-
fectionism forecloses,” she writes
in “Scratched: A Memoir of Per-
fectionism.” Locked in a kind of
Sisyphean stasis, she types out
the same paragraph, or even the
same sentence, over and over. It
is nauseating drudgery, writerly
hell. But in the perverse logic of
her disorder, her inability to
write anything that is less than
perfect becomes infused with a
“thrilled momentousness”: Not
having yet achieved a radiantly
perfect text means that “I was
always closing in on the most
beautiful thing I’d ever written.”
Is this simply the condition,
perhaps exaggerated, of being
an artist? What serious writer
doesn’t strive for the most per-
fect prose, the greatest novel?
William Faulkner declared “The
Sound and the Fury” his “most
splendid failure,” its four-section
structure a result of his four
attempts—and failures—to get
the story right.
Or is this the condition of
being a woman? Of having so
internalized impossible stan-
dards and expectations that one
unleashes torrents of criticism
and abuse on oneself? “I’m only
one of countless girls pitting
themselves against their hair,
their thighs, their bellies,” writes
Ms. Tallent, in a flashback to her
college self. This might be es-
pecially the case if one is born
into a society obsessed with per-
fection and conformity—1950s
America, say, an “ideal incu-
bator” of perfectionism—as she
was.
The answer is both and nei-
ther. Ms. Tallent’s exploration of
perfectionism is an exploration
of living as a writer and living as
In the
short
stories
of
Lorrie
Moore,
wise-
cracks
keep
the tears
at bay.a woman, of forever chasing
“unerring rightness, beauty the
barest millimeter beyond this
page.” But as she turns perfec-
tionism over, studying its facets,
its idiosyncrasies, it becomesclear that this disorder stems
from something more universal
than writing or womanhood: the
loss of love. “However I char-
acterize perfectionism now—
as affliction; as personality dis-
position—it first arose as a
defense against despair,” she
writes. “It is a cure turned rav-
enous wound.”
When Ms. Tallent was born,
her mother refused to hold her.
Waking up from “twilight sleep,”
the sedation that left mothers
awake during the pain of labor
but unable to recall it afterward,the young mother was disori-
ented. The infant brought to her
didn’t look like the flawless,
wide-eyed Gerber baby; she was
“all scratched”—a common phe-
nomenon, the nurse explained,
from the baby’s fingernails in
utero, nothing serious. Still, Ms.
Tallent’s mother rebuffed her
again and again.
The passages recounting this
foundational scene and the
secondary one when, at age 19,
Ms. Tallent hears it retold by her
mother, both delivered in a
scorching stream of conscious-
ness, are among the memoir’s
most powerful:When I took off my sunglasses
she saidDid you know when
you were born they couldn’t
get me to take youand I made
a sound in my throat, actual
words might derail her, she
could be quick to bristle at a
wrong intonation, and it was
unusual for her to tell a story
of any kind, barely had she be-
gun spinning the thread before
I feared its abrupt severance,
it didn’t matter that I knew
full well I should dread whatScratched
By Elizabeth Tallent
Harper, 227 pages, $26.99
she was about to say, her tone
would have alerted me even
if the prefaceDid you know
hadn’t, hurtfulness from her
was often prefaced by a dodgy
Did you knowwhen there was
no chance you did....They
kept bringing you in and I kept
telling them to take you away.
Don’t ask why, I warned my-
self.Ms. Tallent weaves reflections
on her sense of intrinsic wrong-
ness as a child with her later ex-
periences struggling to overcome
her perfectionism—raising her
son, undergoing years of psycho-
analysis. Her mother’s “Don’t you
know I thought you were going
to be perfect?” mixes, as her son
spills his milk, with his “Every-
body makes mistakes”—a chorus
of voices battling in her head.
Perfectionism itself is one of
those voices, too often the loud-
est, “a love letter the psyche
sends to an unresponsive Other,
swearingI’ll change everything if
you will only come back.”
Her writing is beautiful and
precise, full of flashing insights
and bracing honesty. She names
her disorder again and again—
perfectionism is “the failure to
be interested in things as they
are,” perfectionism is “petrified
panic”—as if to assert mastery
over it, like Adam naming the
animals. But she knows that
there is something exasperating
about the self-confessed per-
fectionist: “In a boon rare among
afflictions, to name yourself its
sufferer is to flatter your own
character as uncompromising.... ‘I’msucha perfectionist’ fails
to sound sick.” She knows, too,
that she is not writing from a
place of triumph; she has not
vanquished the enemy, though
she has learned to raise her
voice in the chorus of voices,
to tell it, “You are not that inter-
esting.”
Mantras about being willing
to fail or the need to “fail fast,
fail often” are vapid and trite—
the stuff of unreflective Silicon
Valley narcissism. But there is
a latent theory here of art as
failure, or even as Faulknerian
splendid failure. Ms. Tallent
managed to break her silence
because she decided to “live
without the radiant book this
one has failed, over and over,
to be, the ravishing book now
absolutely beyond reach, because
it’s become this one instead.”
Ms. Winkler writes on books
and culture for the Journal and
other publications.To Perfection and Back
PETRIFIEDTallent in Arches National Park, Utah, June 2017.
GABRIEL TALLENTA memoir of futility
by a writer who went
silent for 22 years after
making a dazzling
literary debut.BOOKS
‘He with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.’—GOETHE
HENRY FARRELL, the head
of a doughty one-man police
department in the northeast
Pennsylvania hamlet of Wild
Thyme, is the rueful narrator of
“The Bramble and the Rose”
(Norton, 198 pages, $25.95),
Tom Bouman’s third novel to
feature this rural lawman. Self-
described as “a high-school-educated military
veteran...giventoanxiety and depression,”
Farrell likes being on his own in the great outdoors:
“The farther I am from a crowd, the better I feel.”
But nature has its own perils. Early one cold
morning, a concerned citizen leads Farrell to a
headless corpse lying deep in a forest. Physical
evidence suggests that a bear has been at the
body, but there are also signs of human inter-
ference. Was the victim killed by beast or by
man? Soon, Farrell has teamed up with a biologist
who runs a nearby lab. She insists that their
priority should be to find that bear: “Whether he
did it or not,” she says, he may be trouble now
that he has feasted on human
flesh and taken a liking to it:
“The switch is flipped now.
He’s eaten the apple;
he understands we’re food.”
While the biologist and
Farrell track the bear day
and night, the headless victim
is identified as an out-of-town
ex-cop turned private investigator. What or who
brought him to Wild Thyme? “Someone knew
more than I did,” Farrell concludes, “and he
was out there.” Now the officer is hunting
that mystery man as well.
Along the way, Farrell struggles with the
exigencies of his personal life. Until recently a
widower, he’s newly married to a second wife—
“Miss Julie,” as he calls her—“a woman I never
deserved.” He is, we see, afraid to let his guard
down, remembering “how easily things could be
taken away in our civilized world... things
ripped from me that I couldn’t live without.”
Alas, Farrell learns that it was an ex-fling
of his that brought the private investigator to
Wild Thyme. Before his former girlfriend can
tell Farrell more, she too comes to harm, leaving
him in a bigger quandary than ever: “baffled by
my future and caught in my past.”
The officer’s present is further complicated
by the disappearance of his teenage nephew,
who may have wandered into the den of villains
whom Farrell pursues. Soon enough, Farrell
himself comes under suspicion for what’s
befallen his ex-flame.
“The Bramble and the Rose” has animal-
hunting sequences to rival those of William
Faulkner and hand-to-hand combat struggles
as tense as any depicted by Ron Rash or Daniel
Woodrell. Mr. Bouman writes like a poet, whether
describing an autumn landscape or a bear
autopsy or a man in a midlife crisis. As the tale
moves to a close and its story lines converge,
Farrell’s personal dilemmas resolve in a burst
of grace worthy of the mystery of life itself.THIS WEEK
The Bramble
and the Rose
By Tom
BoumanMYSTERIES
TOMNOLANThe Case
Of the Headless
Stranger
FICTION
SAMSACKSIF YOUR REACTIONto the
coronavirus outbreak has been
to crack dumb jokes about beer
or search out tasteless memes
on Facebook, you may be the
right reader for Lorrie Moore’s
“Collected Stories” (Every-
man’s Library, 745 pages,
$27). It’s usually cancer that is
scaring the bejesus out of Ms.
Moore’s characters, but the
frazzled irreverence is applica-
ble in all matters of mortality.
“I’ve had sonograms. I’ve had
mammograms. Next week I’m
going in for a candygram,” one
woman riffs. When a doctor
prescribes “a little light chemo”
for a 2-year-old with renal
cancer, as though it were some
sort of evening music, the
baby’s horrorstruck mother
blurts, “Eine kleinedactino-
mycin. I’d like to see Mozart
write that one up for a big wad
o’ cash.” The gags are group
therapy, because in Ms. Moore’s
world everybody is falling
apart—some people just aren’t
yet showing the symptoms.
In another story a doctor terms
a mole he has removed from a
woman’s back “precancerous.”
“Precancer?” she wonders.
“Isn’t that...likelife?”
Ms. Moore has written three
novels and a host of arts criti-
cism, but she will always be
identified with her short stories,
of which she has four collections,
beginning with the vamping,
acerbic debut “Self-Help” from- If you can cast your mind
back to that period in time, you
may recall that the fashion in
short fiction was a button-
lipped minimalism that tried to
invest an abyss of emotion into
the slightest of gestures. Ms.
Moore wrote about much the
same things as the minimalists—
adultery, divorce, illness, small-
town ennui—but she had no
use for negative space. Her
stories are eruptions of verbos-
ity, as though silence is more tobe feared than whatever crisis
her characters are undergoing.
They banter, pun, toss up
non sequiturs, get lost in mazy,
irrelevant flights of fancy. It’s
difficult to picture Raymond
Carver having this run through
the mind of a character: “When
Robert MacNeil talks about
mounting inflation, you imagine
him checking into a motel room
with a life-size, blow-up doll.”
Jokes are so much the
signature of Ms. Moore’s stories
that it’s hard to stop singling
them out. (“I don’t want to be
cremated,” awoman decides.
“I used to, but now I think it
sounds just a little too much
like a blender speed.”) But
there’s a method to the motor-
mouthed madness. A likely
influence is Donald Barthelme,
whose experimental stories
Ms. Moore has described as
“a registration of a certain kind
of churning mind, cerebralfragments stitched together in
the bricolage fashion of beatnik
poetry.” While far more grounded
in realism than Barthelme’s,
her stories also operate like
sluice gates for the unconscious
mind, channeling whatever
ideas and observations pour
out. “The very thing that your
brain does at night—it makes a
dream—is the thing that writers
do when they’re awake,” she
has explained, adding, “It’s
probably a form of psychosis.”
A kind of suburban surrealism
results, sublime in its ascending
absurdities. In “Real Estate,” a
woman is driven to distraction
battling the pests invading her
new house: carpenter ants,
squirrels, raccoons, crows, bats
and finally a teenager squatting
in the attic. The fine story
“Childcare” gives a sense of the
accidental associations the
narratives can unearth. A young
woman has been hired as a
nanny for an overworked, middle-
aged restaurateur trying to
adopt a baby. After a disastrous
meeting with the birth mother
scuttles the plan, the narrator
glimpses a vision of her future
self in her distraught employer,
“a lonely woman with a yarny
schmatte on her head.” But in
the midst of the bitterness they
listen to one of Bach’s French
Suites, the music “like an
elegant interrogation made of
tangled yarn.” As a motif of both
failure and hope, the image of
yarn is unexpectedly poignant,
a symbol of fragility and undoing
but also flexibility and re-creation.These subtleties exist
between the lines, but you have
to tune your ear to hear them
behind the badinage. The frus-
tration in Ms. Moore’s stories
is not that the ceaseless riffing
is insensitive but that it can
become obnoxious. David Foster
Wallace, Ms. Moore’s contem-
porary, grouped her within the
movement of postmodern
ironists that included David
Letterman, who had introduced
a kind of snarky, in-joke decon-
struction of the traditional talk
show. You can grow weary of
the chatterbox cleverness in Ms.
Moore’s stories, the winking,self-aware joke they make of
telling bad jokes.
Wallace was being critical.
He wanted a return to narrative
sincerity. What he missed in
Ms. Moore’s stories, especially
those in her capacious 1998
collection “Birds of America,”
was the underlying earnestness
that gives rise to all the anxious
monologizing. Their work had
far more in common than hemight have cared to admit:
great lexical ingenuity in the
service of a sparkling patina
of sarcasm, but beneath the
display a sober recognition
of stark, intractable realities.
In Ms. Moore’s exceptional
1996 story “People Like That
Are the Only People Here,”
set in a hospital’s pediatric
oncology ward (known as Peed
Onk), a terrified mother realizes
that her only hope is to live by
clichés like “Take one day at a
time”: “She wishes that there
were more interesting things
that were useful and true, but
it seems now that it’s only the
boring things that are useful
and true.” Here’s Wallace about
AA meetings in “Infinite Jest,”
published the same year:
“Why is the truth usually not
just un- butanti-interesting?”
Justly, “Collected Stories”
showcases the good and the
annoying sides of this author.
This classy, reasonably priced
edition contains all 40 of her
stories (up through the 2014
collection “Bark”), with three
excerpts from her novels
thrown in for good measure.
Yet Ms. Moore has organized
them alphabetically rather than
chronologically, which is the
sort of rude, whimsically per-
verse thing her characters tend
to do. Can’t you play it straight,
just for once? you want to ask
her, before you remember who
you’re talking to—the person
who wrote that “it made any
given day seem bearable,
that impulse toward a joke.”You Might as Well Laugh
THIS WEEK
Collected Stories
By Lorrie MooreJOKERMoore in 2006.
ALAMY