August 20, 2020 31
story in this country has always been
about middle-class discontent. Lahiri’s
achievement was in her strategy (the
middle-class discontent of brown peo-
ple); Moore’s is in her sensibility.
The latter is more remarkable, or
more enduring. Much of what Birds of
America holds—death, divorce, dis-
may—is familiar, but two decades on,
the stories continue to surprise: odd
and electric, simply because of how
they’re told. A Collected Stories might
seem valedictory, but I hope it is not. I
think it nearer a correction of the re-
cord, more lasting than the Pulitzer.
The characters in Birds of Amer-
ica include a faded actress living in a
cheap motel, a couple struggling stoi-
cally through infertility, and a woman
who drops a friend’s baby, killing it.
You’d hardly guess, from this synop-
sis, the book’s fundamental optimism.
“Terrifi c Mother” tells the story of the
woman who dropped the baby. She
goes abroad with a husband she barely
knows, in search of deliverance:
She turned, and for a moment it
seemed they were all there in Mar-
tin’s eyes, all the absolving dead
in residence in his face, the angel
of the dead baby shining like a
blazing creature, and she went to
him, to protect and encircle him,
seeking the heart’s best trick, oh,
terrifi c heart. “Please, forgive me,”
she said.
And he whispered, “Of course.
It is the only thing. Of course.”In the decade that elapsed between
Birds of America and A Gate at the
Stairs, that premillennial optimism—
we thought Al Gore would be presi-
dent!—hardens. Grace no longer seems
enough, or worth waiting for, or, in-
deed, the “only thing”: “I was once in
a restaurant and saw Karl Rove sitting
across the room,” the novel’s narrator
tells us. “For fi ve minutes I thought: I
could take this steak knife and walk over
there and change history. Right now.”
In Bark, Moore’s 2014 collection, the
laughs are considerably less funny. In
“Foes,” a man encounters a woman sus-
picious of Obama: “Your man Barama,
my friend, would not even be in the
running if he wasn’t black.” In “The
Juniper Tree,” three women drop in on
the ghost of a friend who has just died:
“It’s been a terrible month. First the
election, and now this.” In “Debark-
ing,” a man is undone by the end of his
marriage: “Divorce is a trauma, believe
me, I know. Its pain is a national secret!
But that’s not it. I can’t let go of love. I
can’t live without love in my life.”
“Paper Losses,” one of Moore’s fi n-
est recent works, follows a couple, Kit
and Rafe, through their divorce: “The
summons took her by surprise. It came
in the mail, addressed to her, and there
it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d
been properly served. The bitch had
been papered.” That “bitch” is harder
than anything in the earlier stories. The
writer sees the world differently now,
and maybe with the wisdom of age, it’s
more diffi cult to sustain optimism.
Impending divorce or no, the family
goes for a Caribbean getaway, the in-
verse of a honeymoon. The fi nal morn-
ing of the trip, they troop to the shore
to watch a resort employee release
some turtle hatchlings:He took them over to the water’s
edge and let them go, hours too
late, to make their own way into
the sea. And one by one a frigate
bird swooped in, plucked them
from the silver waves, and ate them
for breakfast.Moore never promised that art might
console us; quite the opposite. In her
greatest story, “Dance in America”
(1993), a dance teacher is visiting an
old friend, Cal, his wife, Simone, and
their son, Eugene, who has cystic fi bro-
sis. Cal tells her, “It’s wonderful to fund
the arts. It’s wonderful; you’re wonder-
ful. The arts are so nice and wonderful.
But really: I say, let’s give all the money,
every last fucking dime, to science.”
At the story’s conclusion the four
characters dance, the profoundly ill
child trying not to cough:I am thinking of the dancing
body’s magnifi cent and ostenta-
tious scorn. This is how we offer
ourselves, enter heaven, enter
speaking: we say with motion, in
space, This is what life’s done so
far down here; this is all and what
and everything it’s managed—this
body, these bodies, that body—so
what do you think, Heaven? What
do you fucking think?“Dance in America” is brief; you’ve
probably received e-mails that are lon-
ger. But why ask for more? It’s as capa-
cious as a novel. This story reminds us
that art is not enough, but it is all we
have. QDAVID KAISER
(1969–2020)We mourn the death of David Kaiser,
a long-standing contributor, colleague, and friend.FINALIST FOR THE 2020
INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
“Rijneveld’s language renders the world
anew.... The strangeness of a child looking at
the strangeness of the world.”
—INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES’ CITATION“Exceptional”—FINANCIAL TIMES
“Exhilarating”—THE INDEPENDENT
“Luminous”—THE OBSERVER
“Beautifully wild”—THE GUARDIAN
“Impressive”—THE ECONOMIST
I asked God if he please couldn’t take my
brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. “Amen.”
THE DISCOMFORT
OF EVENING
By Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
GRAYWOLF PRESS
graywolfpress.org