Bark gives love, death a going-over
BLEAKNESS TOUCHED WITH HUMOUR Moore’s collection comes at a time when people are talking about short stories
At a time when Alice Munro’s Nobel, Lynn Coady’s Giller and Mavis Gallant’s death have people talking about short stories more than at any point in recent memory, it’s almost eerily appropriate that Lorrie Moore should return with her first new collection in 16 years. No disrespect intended to the American writer’s three novels — A Gate at the Stairs is especially fine — but it’s her ability to balance humour and gravitas in condensed doses that has earned her a devoted following.
Birds of America from 1998 is one of those books that gets passed from hand-to-hand, like a talisman. Its centrepiece highlight, People Like That Are the Only People Here, put Moore firmly in the company of Munro and Gallant, and makes the long-awaited Bark a bona fide event.
Love and death — and the many ways they intertwine — have been Moore’s preoccupations from the beginning, and the eight stories in
IAN
McGILLIS Bark aren’t exceptions. The big L, especially, gets a thorough going-over, and if these stories are taken as a prognosis on the current state of adult heterosexual relationships in America, the outlook isn’t good. The closest thing to a conventionally successful partnership — which is to say this couple are still actually together, and show no immediate signs of breaking up — is found in Foes, and even there one partner is reduced to pleading, “Don’t ever leave me,” seemingly out of the blue. More typical are Kit and Rafe of Paper Losses, after 20 years together “partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage.”
Women have a hard time of it in Mooreland. Men — “walking caveat emptors” in one female character’s mem- orable assessment — have a habit of disappearing out the figurative back door, or in one case literally out the bathroom window. “A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully,” muses Kit in Paper Losses. “That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”
Given all this interpersonal bleakness, those new to Moore might well find themselves wondering where exactly the funny parts figure. The answer, it turns out, is everywhere, because with Moore, as in all the best literature, humour is integral to the human condition, its only limitation being temporal. Kit, again, can serve as the spokesperson: “Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.”
If there’s a rival to Birds of America’s dizzy heights to be found in Bark, it’s Wings. Inspired (though you wouldn’t necessarily notice had it not been pointed out by the author) by Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, the story follows the travails of two aging hipsters just beginning to understand that their attempted music career is in terminal decline.
When not off on errands for her feckless boyfriend Dench, KC finds herself spending time with an elderly widower who lives one street over. An awkward but genuine bond begins to form, two worlds that seldom intersect are brought together in a delicate dance, and by the end laughter and tears are such near neighbours as to be virtually the same thing.
The only real sign of these stories’ long prepublication lifespan is in their time setting: Many take place in the period between 9/11 and Obama’s election, and the hot-button issues of the day are often a factor, whether in-frame or just outside. Too often, though, those elements feel awkwardly inserted rather than integral to the story.
In Foes, an Obama supporter gets seated next to a Republican birther at a fundraising dinner; the former’s disapproval of the latter is played for laughs until it’s revealed that the latter’s right-wing patriotism is rooted in a very real trauma suffered on 9/11. It should be a bracing lesson on the dangers of stereotyping, but the intended sting just isn’t there because we sense the controlling hand of the clearly Obama-supporting author too strongly.
Even when all of the ingredients aren’t in perfect harmony, though, Moore’s strengths — her unerring ear for the way modern Americans speak, her uncanny ability to flip from belly laughs to deep unease and back again, often so fast that you have to stop and take stock of your reactions — carry the day. The only outright dud is the thankfully brief The Juniper Tree, a ghost story that can be filed as a worthwhile experiment just doesn’t work.
In the end, then, Bark may not quite hit the heights of Birds of America, but coming to that judgment is a bit like trying to determine whether a new album by one of your favourite bands is simply a strong selection of songs or something greater than the sum of its parts. As problems go, it’s one of the nicer ones to have. Bark: Stories By Lorrie Moore Bond Street Books/ Doubleday Canada 192 pages, $29.95