#566 Subject to Search- Lorrie Moore

#566 Subject to Search- Lorrie Moore

Tom has always been an exciting man to her. He probably used to run drugs the length of Europe but now he is much more respectable. He is in the International intrigue business as some sort of consultant for British Intelligence. The undercover secretive thing makes her like him more:

“The closed-the-open-again secrets of his work enchanted and paralyzed her, like the frog who fatally acclimates to the heating water.”

They have a long running relationship, both at one time married, then not. His status in the government makes him important and yet somehow unattainable. She hopes for the best: “We’re all suckers for happy endings.”

Notable Passage: “If you’re suicidal…and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as wry.”

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#538 Referential- Lorrie Moore

#538 Referential- Lorrie Moore

There is a strong bond between a single mother and her only son. The son has mental problems and has been institutionalized for four years. He has been suicidal. His mother has understandably changed her whole life around her son’s condition. Caught in the web of this misfortune is Pete, the mother’s boyfriend.

“At one point he had been poised to live with her, but her child’s deepening troubles had caused him to pull back—he believed he loved her but could not find the large space he needed for himself in her life.”

This isn’t Pete’s son, and as much as he wants to do the right thing, it’s hard for him. He has been struggling with his own life. And now it seems that the son’s situation has gotten worse.

“Once her son had only wanted a distracting pain, but then soon he had wanted to tear a whole in himself and flee through it.”

When Pete and the mother go to visit, it is uncomfortable and awkward. The mother wants to bring his back home. When she gets anonymous calls the truth of her future with Pete becomes obvious. Sometimes even when people are calling for help, you can’t hear them

“How could people be mentally well in such a world?”

Notable Passage: “Mutilation was a language. And vice versa.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#504 Wings- Lorrie Moore

#504 Wings- Lorrie Moore

This story is the perfect depiction of how the world sees generation-x and probably a little how generation-x views itself—or maybe just how I view it. KC and Dench are in a long term relationship, in their late thirties and are going nowhere. Neither is their music career. Their last tour has ended and they are renting an old house and KC is doing some mid life re-evaluating.

“She spent a decade barking up the wrong tree.”

“She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his which was worse.”

While Dench is staying home probably having similar thoughts, KC befriends an old man and finds peace and truth in his presence. She likes the old-fashioned attention he gives her, like the parents she missed. She struggles with what to do from here on out.

The story is a good one, it hits on the right somber notes, not too powerful and not too delicate. The imagery is great, little detail like the old man complaining about age then flashing a smile with “Sepia teeth”…a color usually describing an old photograph.

And of all the movies, books, songs, and random conversations I’ve had over the years, never before has there been a better description of a Generation-X relationship than this one sentence:

“I don’t know what I want…and I don’t know what you’re doing.” AMAZING!!!

As with a lot of Moore’s stories I find this has a little too much “extra” material. There are pages of stuff that would be great for development in a novel, but I find extemporaneous in shorter fiction—but that is just a personal preference. I also get stopped when I come to a phrase like this:

“Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful. Or fruitful with the right fruit.”

It’s nice wordplay, great musical cadence, but it seems like phrase just dropped into the story for its form, and to me feels un-integrated in the flow of the piece. It happens a few times per story where I stop to re-read a passage and wonder why it’s there; They’re not unpleasant, just out of place. It would be like walking in a secluded forest and suddenly coming across a string quarter. That would be a beautiful sight, just not the sight you set out to find...and the rest of your hike you find it hard to enjoy the natural beauty of the forest because you have the string quarter stuck in your mind.

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total= 35

#482 Foes- Lorrie Moore

#482 Foes- Lorrie Moore

Imagine being at a high-class function, and not only does the person you’re talking to seem oblivious to the sarcastic way you are talking but also seems to be diametrically opposite of your core political leanings. You try to bring the tense moments around with humor but they either don’t take the lifeline or they have no desire to be pleasant.

“Now would not be the time to speak of timing. It would be unlucky to speak of luck. Could he speak of people having things they didn’t deserve, in a room full of such people?”

Baker is an author of a recent George Washington biography and has been invited by a literary magazine to be at their fundraiser. His job as a famous writer is to sit at the table and charm the guests that are paying $500 a plate. He gets stuck in this heated discussion with a self-proclaimed “Evil Lobbyist.” Sounds like loads of fun.

I did find this description of Washington DC to be pretty on-point: “An ostentatious company town built on a marsh—a mammoth, pompous chit-ridden motor vehicle department run by gladiators. High-level clerks on the take, their heads full of unsound sound bites and falsified recall.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#461 Paper Losses- Lorrie Moore

#461 Paper Losses- Lorrie Moore

Here is another story about a failed, loveless marriage, perhaps even infidelity. At this point of this story-a-day exercise of mine there are some topics that I just don’t like to read about anymore. This is one of them. So, I say right away, I know that it’s not Moore’s fault that I am saturated with this topic. On the other hand, stories that astound the reader often do so by transcending the topic. Yesterday, the Lahiri story I read, Sexy, was about infidelity and a failed marriage, but I found interest in it, because at least it was coming from a different perspective.

Trying to stay somewhat objective, I found the writing here to be a little uneven. Moore is exceedingly clever and creative in her word play and ironic observances. However, it seems here that those moments overshadowed the objective of the piece. If I stop and say—hey, that phrase the author used is a clever one—then I’m taken out of the narration a bit. I didn’t believe I was hearing the narrator speaking, I was seeing the writer, writing clever phrases.

But, some of them were definitely winners, or at least fodder for bumper stickers:

“Rage had it’s medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away, loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center in a cold blue heat.”

“Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even buried in an excellent suit.”

“Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never-ending.”

“All husbands are space aliens.”

“Hope is never false. Or it is always false. Whatever, it’s just hope.”

“Divorce she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab, as in who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog.”

Rating: 7-5-5-7 Total= 24

#440 Debarking- Lorrie Moore

#440 Debarking- Lorrie Moore

Ira was divorced and was having a hard time coping with his new reality. He claimed his wedding ring was stuck on his finger and he couldn’t get it off. He had an eight-year old daughter and a host of good friends.

He started dating a woman, also divorced with a son, that he met at a friend’s party. It was an awkward start, being so unpracticed at dating:

“This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating.”

As the reader, I was rooting for him, feeling bad at the uncomfortable moments, nodding at the I’ve-been-there moments. But after a while, I got the feeling that this woman was either taking advantage of him, unable to have a relationship post-divorce, or she was a little bit crazy. Either way, the whole second half of the story—which ran on for a bit too long—was filled with this tense frustration where you just wished it (the frustration, not the story) would end.

Quality writing.

Notable Passage: “When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.”

Rating: 9-7-8-7 Total= 31

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

#419 The Juniper Tree- Lorrie Moore

Robin Ross has died over night, she was suffering in the hospital a week before finally succumbing to cancer. He goof friend was going to visit the night before she died, but it was late and she decided not go, now she will never have a chance to say goodbye.

This story is a dream, or a mental hallucination, a creation born of anxiety and guilt. She imagines Robin coming back as a ghost for one day so she and her friends can have one more night of drinking together. She tries to put her own life in perspective, feeling inadequate.

“In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our mothers, and one another.”

Notable Passage: “Somewhere inside us we were joyful orphans: our lives were right, we were zooming along doing what we wanted, we were sometimes doing what we loved. But we were inadequate as a pit crew for ourselves, or anyone else.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

#89 Two Boys- Lorrie Moore

Mary is enjoying her young single life. For the first time, she has two boyfriends. Number One is good-looking, funny, and married with two kids. Number Two is brooding, warm, and a little intense.

“Alone Numbers One and Two were missing parts.” She fantasizes about having a Number Three, perfect and there when the first two aren’t enough. This goes fine for a while, but she has predictable problems balancing her desires and her emotions.

“Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower.”

She reacts in odd ways like painting her entire apartment white, and throwing out all the furniture, "she needed plans.” So, she takes a random trip to Canada and writes to both suitors when she will be back. Number Two is at the station waiting. She is grateful and disappointed as she always seems to be about Two. Number One is glib about not being available and seems to be leaning back towards going back to his wife and family.

She has not found happiness, has stressful dreams and imagines herself as a young girl waiting for her boyfriends, who are either dead, or hanging there as slabs of meat.

Notable Passage: “You choose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 31

#64 People Like That are the Only People Here- Lorrie Moore

#64 People Like That are the Only People Here- Lorrie Moore

For the first two months of this project, I’ve used Friday’s as a showcase for O. Henry. Not wanting to get too repetitive or to use one author for such a high percentage of my reading, I’d like to change things up a bit.  For the next few months, O. Henry Friday’s will highlight winners and finalists of the O. Henry Awards, thus changing up gears a but, but keeping to the spirit of the original idea.

For starters, we have the 1^st prize story for the 1998 O. Henry awards, written by American Author, Lorrie Moore. Besides being one of the best titles for a story I’ve ever seen, this story is a beast.  It’s a tough topic, the worst topic actually—a child with cancer. “Baby and chemo, she thinks: they should never even appear in the same sentence together, let alone the same life.”

The Mother (Capitalized like you would God) is a writer and struggles with trying to take notes about this impossible experience to write pieces to raise money to pay for the treatment. But she’s having trouble

-“This is the Hieronymus Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs. This is a nightmare of narrative slop. This cannot be designed.”

-“I write fiction. This isn’t fiction.”

-“A Beginning, an end: there seems to be neither. The whole thing is like a cloud that just lands, and everywhere inside it is full of rain.”

The whole note-taking adds a Meta-level that increases the tension of the story. It’s emotional, frantic, ironic, humorous—in the way that jokes can relieve unbearable tension when things are awful, the kind of jokes that make you chuckle dryly but never actually laugh. The writing is real and not at all indulgent or derivative as such stories can often develop.

Notable Passage: “What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do.”

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34