The ObserverLorrie MooreReviewThe author is still capable of surprise with her offbeat, funny, painful stories of middle-class Americans with midlife worriesThree decades in print, lauded for her short stories (collected in Self-Help and Birds of America, among others) and her novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore can surely now be called a doyenne of American literature. Faber agrees: Self‑Help is published as a Faber Modern Classic.
Offbeat and oblique, Moore has made a trademark of looking sidelong at contemporary behaviour in middle-class middle America; of sometimes witty and sometimes dreadful puns; of snippets of conversation that have the sense of “found” art.
Although this can be confusing (the second story in this collection, The Juniper Tree, is a fragmented mishmash of memories topped, literally, with a lemon meringue pie), when the elements work in symphony, they reveal a glimpse – awkward, funny or rawly vulnerable – of this thing we are all enmeshed in, the human condition.
Moore used to do this with a wink; now she does it with a bark – and it’s a good title, Bark: both thickened, impervious tree-skin and a desperate shout of wry laughter. Characters are more likely than not mid-divorce, or recently divorced, or floating anchorless on a wide, deep sea enduring the strange shadow play that is the midlife dating scene.
In “Debarking”, Ira starts a relationship with Zora, a paediatrician who rues the fact doctors are not allowed to hit their patients; she also makes wooden sculptures of naked adolescent boys and is constantly and uncomfortably physical with her own teenage son. The happiest part of the ending is that Ira has sloughed off some of this gnarlier skin; he is more open to new experiences.
“Wings” is the story of a pair of stalled – failed – musicians, listlessly eking out summer in a rented house with a putrefying rat in its recesses. Although Dench is the love of KC’s life, there’s not much to their lives together and when KC strikes up an odd friendship with well-off pensioner Milt, it’s not surprising – especially if one is familiar with Henry James’s Wings of the Dove – that this relationship should steer her life.
There is no doubt there’s a lot of darkness in Bark; loneliness and despair and a bleak kind of realism. “Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game.”
But what Moore offers is the artful emergence of small, quiet truths and for that we should be grateful.
Bark is published by Faber, £8.99. Click here to buy it for £6.99
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