Review: Like Life

Like Life by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this one.

I am convinced that, if I’d read it when it came out 30 years ago, I’d have been part of the chorus declaring it “outstanding” (as the cover blurb promises). As it is, I read some of Moore’s work not long after and did jump on board the bandwagon declaring her our leading voice for the American short story.

Even now, with some of the age showing here, I am stunned by the sheer narrative skill here. Each of these stories presents enough insight and information to stand as a novel in a lesser but still talented writer’s hands. And that’s where the art of the short story comes through. She has the capacity to compress experience, to make each word carry more weight than you think possible.

I’ll be reading one of these stories, and I’ll find myself trying to imagine how I could tell the same story. I always fail to do it as well as she does – even when I’m doing it only theoretically – because her work is intricate, because she weaves her stitches so tightly and evenly throughout.

At the same time, I admire the characters who emerge in each of these. A Moore character might seem a stereotype for one sentence, a clever twist on that stereotype with a second, and becomes a wholly original person with a third. That’s all it takes her, three strokes of the brush and her people are unlike any others in fiction.

Why the partial reluctance, then? Some of it is her commitment to an aesthetic I don’t always share and that I’m not sure has aged all that well. I recently read Mary Roach’s Stiff from a slightly later era, and that one struck me as afflicted with a “Seinfeld syndrome,” a too-great readiness to stand and observe rather than sympathize and sustain. I see some of that here as well, I think. Too many of these characters seem to suffer without our being invited to empathize with them.

In the stories I like the most from Moore – above all her magisterial “Dance in America” from Birds of America – there’s simply more heart, more humanity. Here – and maybe it was a ‘90s “thing” – I feel more as if I am being asked to shut up and watch the show. (Didn’t Pearl Jam nail it around the same time with the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – “Here we are now, entertain us”?)

Perhaps as a consequence of that, and perhaps simply as a reflection of the fact that Moore’s skill is so arresting on its own, I also find myself hard-pressed to remember what any particular story is about. Each one is gripping, and I would sometimes put my family on hold to read the final couple pages and get resolution, but then – almost every time – I’d find myself unable to remember exactly what just happened.

I think my favorite story here is probably, “You’re Ugly Too.” It opens with some of those quick and powerful Moore moves, and suddenly it’s clear that Zoe is unhappy with her small-time Illinois life in a way no literary character ever has been unhappy in small-town Illinois. She might have a serious medical condition. She has a chance at an imperfect relationship with a man she imagines caring about.

Every step in the story has narrative power. They can go on a silly date – and he can lean in to kiss her – and I’m hanging on it. At the end, though, much of it remains unresolved. She seems to have blown the guy off, but maybe not. She may be really ill, but we don’t know. I want to ask the questions, and I recognize that Moore is carving out a space for story that falls before what we’d think of as the conventional climax, but I can’t help wanting to know more. Forgive me for being a Philistine, but I want a story that does more than make me admire its craft.

That feels like an unfair claim and, as I say, I suspect it makes me sound insufficiently sophisticated. Somewhere, someone reading this is huffing at me and reaching for a recent New Yorker to clear away the stench.

So, don’t let me go too far in that direction either. Moore’s skill astounds me, and that’s more than worth the price of admission. Knowing some of what she’s gone on to do, and knowing how she’s evolved with some of the zeitgeist as well, I admire this and think of it as prologue to some of the great later work.


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