Almost all the stories in Moore’s influential “ Birds of America” (1998) feature a sick, suffering, or dead child.
The wisecracking heroines now reported from Hell. They were collected in “ Self-Help” (1985), and given ironic how-to titles: “How to Become a Writer,” “How to Be an Other Woman.” Praise for her work came laced with skepticism-could this funny, punny, puckery tone evolve into anything more substantive? The response, in three ensuing volumes of stories, was so unequivocal that it made a mockery of the question. Moore made her name with catchy, charismatic short stories that she began publishing in her twenties-“the feminine emergencies,” she called them. Why else have you given us these naggingly suggestive patterns? Why else is your new novel, “ I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home” (Knopf), wallpapered with codes and clues? Barring these enticements, it’s enough to quote that novel: “There is no disenthralling a determined creature!” (The creature in question is a sow intent on rooting up buried bodies to consume, but let us not look too closely at the metaphor.) Let us talk extravagantly of your artistic growth or lack thereof let us shoehorn in biography. Let us stand on the shore and wave at you, Lorrie Moore. Is every new story here one for the ages? With a book this generous from a writer this gifted, we would be vulgar to ask.” Does the imaginative range seem limited? It is the same limited range Americans are so fond of calling Chekhovian. Reviewing a volume of Ann Beattie’s stories, she writes, “Do the characters sometimes seem similar from story to story? The same can be said of every short-story writer who ever lived. Wave at the boat.” Her clearest countermove can be seen in her decision to arrange the contents of her “ Collected Stories” (2020) alphabetically rather than chronologically as she explained, she wanted to avoid a “linear sequence that would tempt biographical and ‘artistic growth’ pronouncements.” She offers her own decorous, deeply accommodating approach as an alternative model. A collection of her reviews, “ See What Can Be Done” (2018), begins with a line from the jazz musician Ben Sidran: “Critics! Can’t even float. In the course of a long and celebrated career, she has maintained a cagey relationship with criticism, complicated by the fact that she herself is a frequent and accomplished practitioner. Is it possible to critic-proof a work of art? To angle it just out of the reach of our blundering hands? To render it opaque enough to resist interpretation, or maybe just to obscure our view with a shroud of baffling public utterances? Lorrie Moore has tried each of these moves.
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