Review: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m part of the choir when it comes to declaring Lorrie Moore one of the great short story writers of our generation. “Dance in America” from her collection Birds of America, is one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read, and I’ve been happy to teach it more than once.

The challenge for all great short story writers trying to write novels, though, is to figure out how to work from their strength into a new kind of strength. Someone like Nathan Englander – another top tier short story writer – hasn’t quite pulled it all together. His novels feel a little spliced together. I’m not the writer that either Moore or Englander is, not by a long shot, but I have the same issue. It’s simply hard to spin a novel out of the impulses that go into writing short stories.

In Anagrams, Moore solved the problem by never quite leaving the short story form behind. I find that novel a real success as it scrambles its core characters into a series of stories that, with modest elements altered, change the outcome each time. That is, it makes anagrams out of its characters and situations, rearranging the same elements to different results.

This one, though, for all its impressive reputation, feels to me more like an overgrown short story, or perhaps a pair of stories. Like a good short story, it delivers its insights through subtle Joycean epiphanies rather than as the culmination of a novel-like plot. It’s beautiful and subtle – I doubt Moore could write something clumsy or ugly unless she tried – but it doesn’t quite seem at home in the novel form. It’s a bit distended, a bit slow to make its most powerful claims.

The heart of this one is the story of Berie, a woman in the midst of a decaying marriage, as she reflects on her adolescent friendship with Sils, a local teenage beauty. Each half – the present tense of her marriage and the more prominent flashback of her experiences with Sils – deals with the way our most intense relationships don’t quite deliver what we need from them. There’s a beautiful sadness that runs throughout. Her husband is a decent guy, someone with whom she has a mostly positive marriage, but he’s finding that his love for her has slowly dried up. And Sils, while fun and inspirational even, has a deep selfishness to her. Berie eventually steals for Sils, helping her fund an abortion and then to underwrite a lavish-by-small-town-standards lifestyle, and Sils never quite seems to appreciate the sacrifice.

At that level, the novel (or stories) seem to say that the idea of a relationship is never quite the same as the fact of one. At a deeper, late 1980s early 1990s (when this was written) post-structural level, this is full of not-quite-subtle broken signifiers, of words that turn out not to mean what we think they do. In the first few pages, for instance, her husband confuses the “gato” (cat) of Spanish with the “gateau” (cake) of French. Or we get arguments about whether a couch is the same thing as a “chesterfield.” And there are countless other examples of puns that cross languages and ideas that don’t seem to fit within the available words.

I’m not sure that element ages as well as it likely seemed it would in 1994. I’m also not sure the form of this – what I’m tempted to call the bloated short story – works as well as the form that’s supplanted it. That is, I imagine that if Moore wrote this material today, she’d likely fall into the linked short story form that seems the most common way for short story writers of this moment to build from the “smaller” form into a larger one. That is, there are real epiphanies here, but they often get washed out a little as the story continues to further ones.

There’s a lot of power in this one, and I’m glad I finally got to it. Excellent as it is, though, I think it falls a bit short of the extraordinary work Moore gives us elsewhere.


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