The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-08-20)

30 The New York Review

handle her stories of the Trump era,
but I still hope they’re in the offing.)
Like Life’s “The Jewish Hunter”
shows what Moore is able to accom-
plish within the confines of realism.
Odette is a visiting poet (one of many
itinerant artists in Moore’s oeuvre) in a
small town. A friend sets her up with a
local: “His voice was slow with prairie,
thick with Great Lakes.” They bond
over late-night viewings of a Holocaust
documentary. He tells her, eventually,
that that’s how he lost his own parents.
If Moore cannot quite transform his-
tory into narrative device, the result is
still moving. Odette decides to return
to New York City, but is she talking
about romance or life itself?

How could one live in it all? One

had to build shelters. One had to

make pockets and live inside them.

She should live where there were

trees. She should live where there

were birds. No bird, no tree had

ever made her unhappy.

A sense of political consciousness—a
relationship to all of history—is an im-
portant aspect of Moore’s work, some-
times even hidden inside a gag. “Four
Calling Birds, Three French Hens,”
a story collected in Birds of America
(1998), features a woman distraught at
the death of her cat. That said:

Her grief was for something larger,

more appropriate—it was the im-

pending death of her parents; it

was the son she and Jack had never

had (though wasn’t three-year-old

Sofie cute as a zipper?); it was this

whole Bosnia, Cambodia, Soma-

lia, Dinkins, Giuliani, NAFTA

thing.

The domestic is so often misun-

derstood as small, probably because

its most noteworthy practitioners are

women. But its realm is no different

from that of the novel we call “social”:

the small animates what is so big as to

otherwise feel abstract. Here, Moore

acknowledges and then dismisses the

muddle of contemporary reality to tell

a story about a woman and her pet:

A good cat had died—you had

to begin there, not let your blood

freeze over. If your heart turned

away at this, it would turn away

at something greater, then more

and more until your heart stayed

averted, immobile, your imagina-

tion redistributed away from the

world and back only toward the

bad maps of yourself, the sour

pools of your own pulse, your own

tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

But the cat is not the point. I hate cats,

but I get it.

Moore’s four collections of stories

have been interspersed with novels:

Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the

Frog Hospital? (1994), and A Gate at

the Stairs (2009). Is it cheating that

her Collected Stories contains snippets

from the novels?

Realist in its tone, Anagrams is nev-

ertheless a slippery book. The protag-

onist is a singer; no, she’s an aerobics

teacher; no, she’s an academic—the

author keeps undoing her own work,

reminding us that it’s all a fiction. It’s

prismatic by design, so doesn’t co-

here as we might expect a novel to.

It’s a clever workaround for the first-

time novelist: the structure relies on

Moore’s demonstrated ability to write a

killer story, then stitches a few of those

together. The novel’s very point is that

fiction is so often better than life.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

could more accurately be called a no-

vella, an abbreviated tale of remem-

bered girlhood friendship nestled

inside the story of a fraying marriage.

It’s all done with brio, from the first

sentence—“In Paris we eat brains

every night.” The narrator’s recollec-

tion of a friend of her youth, a girl from

the other side of the tracks, is not un-

familiar, but the language is virtuosic,

Moore at her best. The excerpt in this

volume doesn’t hold together as a story

(it needn’t, as it isn’t), nor does it dis-

appoint: “The bad news of the world,

like most bad news, has no place to go.

You tack it to the bulletin-board part

of your heart. You say, Look. You say,

See. That is all.”

The excerpt from A Gate at the Stairs,

appearing under the title “Childcare,”

is less successful than the tastes of

the other novels, perhaps because it is

Moore’s most conventionally novelistic

novel—three-hundred-plus pages of

unsentimental education, a college stu-

dent’s misadventures in George Bush’s

America. It is a dark book reflecting

what many believed to be a uniquely

bitter time in this country’s politics

(how young we were!). The narrator,

Tassie, is an undergraduate who takes

a job as a nanny for a couple who don’t

yet have a child. They’re in the process

of adopting, though we later learn that

they once had a son, who died in a hor-

rific accident.

This plays out against the interna-

tional drama of September 11 and the

beginning of the war in Afghanistan.

The sentences are musical as always,

but there’s an anger that’s truly unset-

tling. In the opening, excerpted here,

Tassie’s employer tells her, “You may

be too young to know this yet, but even-

tually you will look around and notice:

Nazis always have the last laugh.” The

book is unrelentingly grim, disap-

pointed in politics but also in people.

If it now seems prophetic, that doesn’t

make it any easier to read. Still, almost

anything that Moore might have done

after Birds of America, her master-

piece (really an accretion of master-

pieces), would be a let-down.

In her Paris Review interview, she

says that the novel allows her to work

in a more sustainable fashion, whereas

the story has demands:

You have to be able to stay up all

night. To read it all in one sitting

and at some point see the whole

thing through in a rush is part of

the process. There’s urgency and

wholeness in stories.

Moore is speaking as a craftsman, but

that difference registers for the reader,

too. The novels—even the slender Frog

Hospital—grow unsteady, while the

stories are sound. Hence a Collected

Stories; this is Moore’s métier.

When The New Yorker published

“People Like That Are the Only Peo-

ple Here,” in 1997, it illustrated the

story with a photograph of the author.

This seemed to abet some collapse in

the distance between fiction and fact.

Maybe it was just the magazine ac-

knowledging the significance of the

work. Given the story’s particulars and

its urgent tone, readers would probably

have made that leap anyway. It is, the

author has elsewhere confirmed, auto-

biographical—the story of a pediatric

cancer diagnosis, informed by an expe-

rience Moore and her family endured.

There’s a tell in how Moore reduces

characters to role (“the Mother,” “the

Husband,” “the Baby,” “the Surgeon”);

these simple nouns, like the second

person in those early stories, offer the

author a place to hide. The story opens

with the discovery of a blood clot in

the child’s diaper, his mother reason-

ing that he’s found menstrual discharge

in the garbage and put it in his diaper.

“Babies: they’re crazy! What can you

do?”

The Mother is a writer by trade, so

she cannot help but see this moment

as a problem of language: “Baby and

Chemo, she thinks; they should never

even appear in the same sentence to-

gether, let alone the same life.” This

being a story set in America, the par-

ents wor r y, naturally, about money.

The Husband urges his wife to “take

notes,” not for the sake of art, but be-

cause they’ll have bills to pay. She

demurs:

Sweetie, darling. I’m not that good.

I can’t do this. I can do—what can I

do? I can do quasi-amusing phone

dialogue. I can do succinct descrip-

tions of weather. I can do screwball

outings with the family pet.... Our

baby with cancer? I’m sorry. My

stop was two stations back.

This story contains action, plot, di-

alogue, character, and scene, but you

notice only voice, and it’s almost lit-

eral, a hot breath in the ear. The child

is diagnosed and admitted for surgery.

His parents come to know some of the

other families of sick children. “All

these nice people with their brave sto-

ries,” the Husband tells the Mother as

they leave the hospital, their son some-

how spared. “Don’t you feel consoled,

knowing we’re all in the same boat,

that we’re all in this together?”

Moore knows the scenario could be

sentimental; she would never give in to

that. “But who on earth would want to

be in this boat? the Mother thinks. This

boat is a nightmare boat.” Maybe the

story has an analogy in the way chefs

gauge one another’s ability by their

preparations of a humble omelet. “Peo-

ple Like That Are the Only People

Here” is a perfect expression of Moore’s

longstanding preoccupations—mortal-

ity, family, art—and it seems so simple,

so straightforward. But the writer is

still pushing herself, stepping outside

the story’s conventions to slip into first

person in the final two lines, a pirou-

ette worthy of Nabokov: “There are the

notes. Now where is the money?”

“People” was collected in Birds

of America a year later; it was, in

retrospect, a fertile moment for the

American short story. In 2000 the

Pulitzer went to Jhumpa Lahiri, for In-

terpreter of Maladies. (Annie Proulx’s

Close Range: Wyoming Stories was a fi-

nalist.) Lahiri’s capable tales of Indian

immigrants in America don’t really

presage the more complex work she’d

go on to, but the Pulitzer is not given

for potential. Maybe the literary short

Celebrate 100 Years

of Women’s Suffrage

Shortlisted

Women in the Shadows of the

Supreme Court

by Renee Knake Jefferson and

Hannah Brenner Johnson

"An excellent contribution...and

essential for anyone who values

diversity."

—Library Journal

Susan B. Anthony

A Biography

By Kathleen Barry

This thorough biography gives us

essential new insight into the life

and legacy of an enduring

American heroine.

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