August 20, 2020 29
The Element of Surprise
Rumaan Alam
Collected Stories
by Lorrie Moore,
with an introduction by Lauren Groff.
Everyman’s Library, 748 pp., $27.00
In a 2001 interview in The Paris Re-
view, Lorrie Moore mused that the
story is perhaps a “more magical” form
than the novel. “A novel is a job,” she
said, “but a story can be like a mad,
lovely visitor, with whom you spend
a rather exciting weekend.” Moore’s
point of view is the writer’s, but it’s true
for the reader, too. Her hefty Collected
Stories is a very long weekend indeed, a
month of Sundays, mad and lovely.
Maybe too much is made of Moore
the comedienne. She does love a
one-liner—“Marriage, she felt, was a
fine arrangement generally, except that
one never got it generally”—but I think
an overemphasis on her wit reveals our
(low) expectations that short fiction
be solemn and nutritious. The story
quoted above, “Real Estate,” has plenty
of laughter, including an actual solilo-
quy in the form of laughs, the syllable
“Ha!” repeated a little too often—first
it’s sardonic, then absurd. When The
New Yorker published it, in 1998, the
magazine rendered these as a single
paragraph, fifty-nine exclamations, first
mirthless, then manic. In this volume,
the “Ha!” goes on much longer— 982
times. We all know what happens when
you laugh too hard: you cry.
Moore published her first collection
of stories, Self-Help, in 1985, when she
was twenty-eight, but the Collected
Stories are presented in alphabetical
order. Her explanation:
Attempting to glimpse the growth
of an author through chronologi-
cal arrangement is, in my opinion,
often a fool’s errand and even if
possible and successful is some-
what embarrassing to the young
author who remains alive within
the older one.If not disingenuous, this still feels like
a feint; I don’t know if I can trace the
artist’s development, but I know how to
begin at the beginning.
“Go Like This,” dated 1980, probably
counts as Moore’s juvenilia—she fin-
ished her MFA in 1982, at Cornell. You
still encounter this kind of genteel real-
ism in MFA workshops: a main character
who is herself a writer (here, of chil-
dren’s books), comfortably ensconced
in the domestic (husband, daughter,
interesting friends), save one big prob-
lem (cancer). This somber setup betrays
Moore’s youth; in time she would hone
a trick for writing about mortality—de-
moting it from subject to subtext.
Rarer in the graduate seminar,
though, is her self-possession. Self-
help? She hardly seems to need it.
Moore at twenty-three is already adept
with the tools that would define her
work: the sneaky sentence, the idio-
syncratic detail, the pun or one-liner.
Maybe what it amounts to is voice:
When I told Elliott of my suicide
we were in the kitchen bitching
at each other about the grease in
the oven. Funny, I had planned
on telling him a little differently
than No one has fucking cleanedthis shithole in weeks Elliott I have
something to tell you. It wasn’t ex-
actly Edna Millay.Liz, the story’s narrator, intends to kill
herself rather than wage a losing bat-
tle against cancer. Moore is drawn to
the less obvious pathos—the narrator
feigning sleep while her husband mas-
turbates—but the whole endeavor tee-
ters near the mawkish. The writer is
trying to imagine maternity when her
frame of reference is still childhood,
trying to summon the end of a life
while still at the start of her own.Here and in the rest of her work,
Moore isn’t simply performing black
humor, underlining what is horrific
about the world. Nor is she trying to
disorient, elicit a befuddled chuckle as
Barthelme might. It is a laugh in good
faith, an attempt to wrest some joy
from an unfunny universe. That’s part
of why reading Moore is a pleasure—
there’s never a worry that the reader
might be the butt of the joke. And in
this early story she is already gutsy
enough to dispatch her protagonist.
Liz ingests enough Seconal to kill her-
self, and then the disciplined sentences
yield to stream of consciousness: “God,
there’s no music, no trumpet here, it is
fast, and there’s no sound at all, just
this white heat of July going on and on,
going on like this.”
The technical feat of Moore’s earliest
stories is language: the efficacy of tart
observation as exposition, dialogue
that reads as people wish they spoke,
the unpredictable deployment of thesecond person. This last, a strategy
used in several of the early stories in
Self-Help, might read as an apostrophe
to a specific character—a reception-
ist sleeping with a married man, a girl
watching television with her mother, an
aspiring writer. But the reader under-
stands it as intimacy (the writer talking
to herself) or incrimination (the writer
talking to us). The effect is so casual
you scarcely notice that it is an act of
authorial control, albeit one different
from the cool distillation of contem-
poraneous stories by Amy Hempel or
Jayne Anne Phillips.
The second person is coupled with
a formal experiment in “How to Talk
to Your Mother (Notes),” organized in
discrete paragraphs so that a gesture
toward theme (these are only notes)
supplants plot. That voice again:Do not resent her. Think about
the situation, for instance, when
you take the last trash bag from its
box: you must throw out the box
by putting it in that very trash bag.
What was once contained, now
must contain.This isn’t a scene, yet it is somehow
so easy to see, with the second person
abetting that switcheroo of character
and reader.
This business of trash bags is phi-
losophy, and a little silly. Moore might
give her characters wonderful things
to say (“An opera should be like con-
traception: about sex, not children”)
but knows our inner monologues to
be small, illogical, human. We’re all
panicking, and trying to think straight.This is so distinct from the polished
near-poetry of Hempel or Phillips, or
the disciplined constructions of Joyce
Carol Oates or Alice Munro, who de-
fined the medium in that moment of
the early 1980s. The wry jokiness in
Self-Help heralded a more complicated
treatment of the domestic, a rendering
of womanhood as thorny and even un-
pleasant, but I imagine that at the time
the book also felt like a provocation.
As Moore herself helpfully describes
her cancer-ridden protagonist, “Some-
thing uncouth: a fart in the elevator.”
The reader is implicated by that
welcoming if still discomfiting sec-
ond person. The stories collected in
Self-Help almost require the reader’s
participation. A true prodigy, though,
Moore understood that “you,” however
well it served her, might easily sound
foreboding, or strained, or false. She
left it behind, but it’s a measure of her
great influence that it was taken up by
students. For years, apprentice writers
tinkered with that “you”—pity those
workshop teachers—supplanted only
when George Saunders published Pas-
toralia and ambitious undergraduates
started mucking about with magic.
Self-Help is now older than Moore was
when it was published; its stories con-
tinue to feel surprising.That second-person cast off, Moore
continued to explore. Her interest
remained domesticity’s disappoint-
ments. In “Places to Look for Your
Mind,” collected in Like Life (1990),
Moore again inhabits the perspective
of parent instead of child: a New Jer-
sey couple play host to an acquaintance
of their college- age daughter, and his
stay makes them think of their own es-
tranged son. (“The police said drugs.”)
But the thirty-year-old Moore misun-
derstands what it will be to be fi fty- one.
Instead of the tragicomedy of midlife
crisis, she bestows on her main char-
acter, Millie, utter despair: she’s adrift,
without meaningful work, consumed
by the crisis of the environment but un-
able to do more than diligently sort her
recycling. The whole feels like melo-
drama, the story a rehearsal for better
stories yet to come. Still, Moore lands a
punch in its last moment, husband tell-
ing wife, “You are my only friend.” In
her best stories, it’s hard to tell if the
ending is happy or sad.
The collection’s title story is also,
at bottom, a domestic one, though it
pushes outside realism into dystopia:
“That year was the first that it became
illegal—for those who lived in apart-
ments or houses—not to have a tele-
vision.” I don’t think the speculative
mode suits her, or perhaps it’s that she
doesn’t need it. All fiction is invention,
and Moore’s stories can have their out-
landish moments, but she mostly errs
on the side of verisimilitude—the bet-
ter to show people as they really are.
Her stories are animated by external
pressures—illness, heartbreak, parent-
hood, but also political feeling, whether
Millie’s concern for the planet or other
characters’ worries about the Balkan
War or, later, the George W. Bush pres-
idency—but the idea is to give us the
world via the individual response to it.
(I don’t know whether I’ll be able toLorrie Moore; illustration by Hope Gangloff