#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

#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