Review: Birds of America

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve known Lorrie Moore’s “Dance in America” for a long time, and I think it’s one of the finest short stories of my adult life. If you’ve never read it, please do. It’s one of the finest celebrations of the capacity for art to stand against death that I have ever read. And, if that sounds like a downer, trust me, it isn’t. I’ve never been anything less than encouraged when I’ve read it.

While I have read a fair amount of other Moore, I hadn’t read any of the other stories in this collection. Most of them are terrific, but I think only one other – “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” quite matches “Dance in America” for as-good-as-the-American-short-story-gets level. That one is a potentially terrifying account of a mother, who’s also a writer, who has to deal with a sudden and potentially fatal disease in her two-year-old son. That ick-kid motif may be limited to these two stories, but Moore is equally excellent in both. She has a way of exploring the ways art can help us confront the worst. There’s nothing easy or sentimental about it; quite the opposite, she resists the easy point, avoids the heartwarming cliché. She makes us work to get a glimpse of something that might comfort us, and that restraint makes the comfort all the more effective.

Moore’s style seems to me to answer Raymond Carver’s; it might even be, though I worry this is an over-simplification, a feminist answer to it. Carver, of course, is powerful for his minimalism. Like a latter-day Hemingway – but with a greater sensitivity to the pain of others – Carver boils experience and language down. There are “extra” words – extra only by the standards of Hemingway, but he’s still generally driving toward his powerful point. He knows what he’s after with his stories, and he delivers.

Moore feels more meandering than that. Her narrators often seem chatty; sometimes, as in the beginning paragraphs of “Terrific Mother,” we’re almost misled by the tone. Other times, such as in “What You Want to Do Fine” or “Real Estate,” she takes a long time to develop character and situation only to conclude with a slight epiphany – but an epiphany all the same, and all the more powerful for the way it seems so fragile.

In other words, she doesn’t always let herself get confined in conventional narrative. Her characters are alive and her situations are real, but they don’t have the neat, directed nature of Carver’s. I can’t decide whether to read that as gendered, but it does seem to resist a certain, masculine-like “all business” quality.

That said, however rambling they can feel, these stories never feel unplanned. In retrospect, they’re doing work that’s a constant surprise. Her characters have depth because we see them in contexts other than the most immediate ones, and we get to see them through skillful set-ups. Years ago, I was at a writers conference, and someone asked a short story writer whose work she read. Without irony, the writer began, “Well you mean other than Lorrie Moore, right?” Some of the settings of some of these stories may have aged a bit, but that strange and compelling skill is still here.

I’m working on an essay about Moore, so I’ll be reading more of her work soon. For now, I’m happy to dig into this work that’s already been an inspiration.

(As a final note, the other two I most admired on this reading are “Willing” and “Beautiful Grade.”)


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