Humour, critique lead tour down memory lane
Lorrie Moore’s collection traces the shifting cultural zeitgeist
Reading See What Can Be Done, Lorrie Moore’s collected works of nonfiction, is like taking a long wander down memory lane. In these pieces — mostly literary essays and criticism first published in the New York Times Review — Moore traces the shifting cultural zeitgeist, from the conservative early 1980s to the present. Early reviews of work by Amos Oz, Don DeLillo and Clarice Lispector give way to riffs on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and the thrill of bingewatching The Wire and Homeland, before finally settling on the tumultuous rise of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Throughout, Moore retains her trademark zany humour, albeit a tad more circumspect in the later works. Her tangential musings, endearing and refreshing in her celebrated short fiction, sometimes stretch themselves thin over the distance of such a fulsome book, the way navigating a foreign city can turn from thrilling to exhausting in the space of one too many dizzying turns.
It might be the length of some of the pieces. Incisive throughout, most re- views stretch on to six or seven pages, a workout for readers in the jittery Twitter age, but a gift to the committed. Some of the strongest essays focus Moore’s intelligence and curiosity on the work of icons such as Atwood, Munro and Ann Beattie. In these reviews, in particular, Moore has an uncanny ability to attune herself to slow-motion tidal shifts in the cultural landscape. Here she is on Atwood’s The Robber
Bride, from 1993: “That women are individuals, difficult to corral, a motley and uneasy sisterhood; that feminism is often hard going and hard-won, sabotaged from within as well as without; that in the war between the sexes there are collaborators as well as enemies, spies, refugees, spectators, and conscientious objectors — all this has been brilliantly dramatized in Atwood’s work.”
At other points, her commentary veers toward the predictable. Lacking the urgency of Rebecca Solnit, the fraught nostalgia of Joan Didion or the heady vertigo of Denis Johnson, Moore’s take on contemporary politics can feel at times anemic. And despite her various asides and digressions, we don’t get much in the way of raw personal impact stemming from monumental events such as Barack Obama’s election or Trump’s shocking ascendancy.
Nevertheless, this is a solid and welcome addition to a superb body of work.