As I suspected, the rest of the stories in Birds of America weren't any better than "Dance in America," which did turn out to be my favorite story from the collection. As the stories went on, I felt the cumulative effect of them as sadness. So many bleak, if not downright tragic lives. And although I wouldn't accuse Moore of being as snooty and presumptuous as some academic writers, she has her moments, and they accumulate. The one I reacted to most strongly is about a midwest restaurant "that advertises 'throwed rolls.'" The characters in the story are startled to have rolls thrown at them, whereas anyone who's ever been to what started out as Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston, Missouri is amply warned--usually for more than twenty miles, by billboard--that rolls will be thrown, er "throwed."
In "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," a woman mourns the death of her cat for two months and then takes her small daughter outside on Christmas morning to scatter his ashes, when instead of the somber ending I had expected, it turns out that
"Aileen and Sofie each seized a fistful of Bert and ran around the yard, letting wind take the ash and scatter it. Chickadees flew from the trees. Frightened squirrels headed for the yard next door. In freeing Bert, perhaps they would become him a little: banish the interlopers, police the borders, then go back inside and play with the decorations, claw at the gift wrap, eat the big headless bird."
But the weight of all the stories' sadness begins to weigh me down as I go on reading them. Reading a story about a mother who discovers that her baby has cancer had me wandering through a wonderful piece of prose, but it was a horrible way to spend part of my afternoon. The mother says
"when your child has cancer, you are instantly whisked away to another planet: one of bald-headed little boys. Pediatric Oncology. Peed Onk. You wash your hands for thirty seconds in antibacterial soap before you are allowed to enter through the swinging doors. You put paper slippers on your shoes. You keep your voice down. A whole place has been designed and decorated for your nightmare. Here is where your nightmare will occur. We've got a room all ready for you. We have cots. We have refrigerators."
Even worse than the sick baby story, at least in some ways, is the one about a woman who runs into her husband in town in the middle of the day:
"when she turned the corner to head back up toward the path to the Villa Hirschborn, there stood Martin, her husband, rounding a corner and heading her way.
"Hi!" she said, so pleased suddenly to meet him like this...."Are you going to the farmacia?" she asked.
"Uh, yes," said Martin. He leaned to kiss her cheek.
"Want some company?"
He looked a little blank, as if he needed to be alone....
"Oh, never mind," she said gaily.
It's bad enough when you meet someone you're glad to see in the course of your daily rounds and they're in a hurry and dismiss you brusquely. It's even worse when it's someone you have assumed will always be glad to see you. It makes your whole life feel fake, like the gaiety this woman has to put on.
Overall, I'm not sure the moments are worth the bleakness and sadness. Why go to a restaurant where rolls get throwed unless you're prepared to shed enough of your dignity to enjoy it?
Showing posts with label Lorrie Moore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lorrie Moore. Show all posts
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Birds of America
I've been reading stories from Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore, because I liked her novel A Gate at the Stairs so much. So far my favorite stories are "Dance in America" and "Community Life," both peppered with little unexpected humorous turns and observations that I think she does even better in the novel.
The beginning of Dance in America captures so perfectly what it's like to teach a class that you've taught to hordes of different people for decades:
"I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird.
I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe....My head fills with my own yack. What interior life has accrued in me is depleted fast, emptied out my mouth...."
In the end, though, the story really is about "flipping death the bird," partly by making jokes about circumstances that would otherwise be too much to bear, like this one, a habitual joke that a happily married couple make to their son when the subject of his mother's first husband, a suicide, comes up:
"You've lived with your mother for seven years now, and you don't know why someone close to her would want to kill himself?"
After the characters' inability to be profound and their pointed but fond and habitual jokes, the story ends with a dance that is a way of showing "magnificent and ostentatious scorn" for all of the indignities bodies suffer on earth. This one may be my favorite of the volume.
Community Life has some good moments, too. My favorite is when a shy character says something astoundingly rude "in the caustic blurt that sometimes afflicts the shy." And how. I think many of us readers have had those moments.
The other moment I like in this story reminds me irresistibly of some of Tassie's observations in A Gate At the Stairs, as if the author's style was developing in this earlier story:
"She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!"
Here we only get a couple of pieces of evidence for why the people are not "kind" or "good." But in the novel we get lots of examples of how a certain kind of person, often an academic, can bank too much on the impeccability of smaller choices, unable to see how cruelly some of those choices add up.
Of course, that kind of cruelty is rarely obvious to the wielder of it. But the "caustic blurt" is immediately obvious to everyone within a mile radius. Care to share one you remember hearing?
The beginning of Dance in America captures so perfectly what it's like to teach a class that you've taught to hordes of different people for decades:
"I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird.
I make this stuff up. But then I feel the stray voltage of my rented charisma, hear the jerry-rigged authority in my voice, and I, too, believe....My head fills with my own yack. What interior life has accrued in me is depleted fast, emptied out my mouth...."
In the end, though, the story really is about "flipping death the bird," partly by making jokes about circumstances that would otherwise be too much to bear, like this one, a habitual joke that a happily married couple make to their son when the subject of his mother's first husband, a suicide, comes up:
"You've lived with your mother for seven years now, and you don't know why someone close to her would want to kill himself?"
After the characters' inability to be profound and their pointed but fond and habitual jokes, the story ends with a dance that is a way of showing "magnificent and ostentatious scorn" for all of the indignities bodies suffer on earth. This one may be my favorite of the volume.
Community Life has some good moments, too. My favorite is when a shy character says something astoundingly rude "in the caustic blurt that sometimes afflicts the shy." And how. I think many of us readers have had those moments.
The other moment I like in this story reminds me irresistibly of some of Tassie's observations in A Gate At the Stairs, as if the author's style was developing in this earlier story:
"She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!"
Here we only get a couple of pieces of evidence for why the people are not "kind" or "good." But in the novel we get lots of examples of how a certain kind of person, often an academic, can bank too much on the impeccability of smaller choices, unable to see how cruelly some of those choices add up.
Of course, that kind of cruelty is rarely obvious to the wielder of it. But the "caustic blurt" is immediately obvious to everyone within a mile radius. Care to share one you remember hearing?
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
A Gate At the Stairs
Yet another snow day--this one official at both of the colleges I work for--gave me the time to finish Lorrie Moore's A Gate At the Stairs, sent to me by Lass, who didn't care for it, and recommended to me by ReadersGuide, who did. I hope Lass will be glad the book has found a more loving home because I do love this novel.
It wooed me with humor, at first. Like the way the heroine, Tassie, looks back at her Wisconsin hometown:
"At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were covered with the local gemutlichkeit: dark paneling and framed deep kitsch, wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus read 'Guten Morgen.' Sauces were called 'gravy.' And the dinner menu featured cheese curd meatloaf and steak 'cooked to your likeness.'"
Or at her father:
"He was not old, but he acted old--nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. 'I had them backed up seventeen deep,' he once boasted to my mom."
I've been behind people like that on the two-lane highway that takes up half an hour of my usually-hour-long commute!
I have a particular fondness for college-age people, which is why I've chosen to spend my life around them, but I'm also getting to college-parent-age, so while I enjoy the irony of the way Tassie uses phrases like "Thanks, maybe later?" and "sounds good," I also enjoy the way her parents see things: "one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read The children. In some dead leaves." And, like Tassie, as a reader, I dreaded meeting high school classmates during college breaks and having them ask "'Whatcha been reading?'
'Why, I've been reading Horace!'"
There's just no way to have a conversation like that. (You know; you're readers, too!)
I laughed on every other page as I read the first half of this novel, no doubt annoying those around me, who less and less often asked what was funny after a few times of being informed that it was something like "Starbucks with its Orwellian sizing--'tall' means 'small'!"
The middle of the novel intrigued me with its love of the north, of the vagaries and varieties of cold weather. As someone who looks forward all year to heat and humidity, I found Tassie's oppression by it curious, and her appreciation of a January day revelatory: "sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine."
I was also pulled farther into Tassie's world by getting caught up in her halfway position between being a sophisticated urban adult and a rural child, between loving an adopted baby as a mother and as an occasional babysitter, between learning what sexual love is and seeing it from the outside, between being the same color as almost everyone around you and seeing what it's like to be a different color. Some of the most poignant moments in the novel occur when Tassie feels what it's like to do something like "simply walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience."
Tassie asks "what was education for, if not to acquire contradictions?" And she appreciates the contradictions in her life, especially at her regular Wednesday night babysitting job at the support group the adoptive mother who employs her starts for "families of color." The bits she overhears sound to her "like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat."
Finally, though, the novel begins to wrap up with sadness layered upon sadness. One of the first sadnesses begins with a story the adoptive mother says she "has to" tell Tassie. Another has begun before Tassie even realizes it, with an email she doesn't answer. The sadness is mixed with satire, as we see the appalling cruelty of the adoption/foster care system revealed and how haphazard the road to patriotism is for one of the faces of the many troops killed in Afghanistan.
Tassie learns that "love is not enough." That "jokes were needed." That "mordancy...was something that could not really be taught. But it could be borrowed. It could be rubbed up against. It could scrape you like bark." We understand, finally why she says "I was on the side of dissent and despair." We accept that, like all the characters longing for another glimpse of the adopted baby Tassie cared for, we aren't going to get one in this novel. And yet, in the end, we see that Tassie isn't going to settle for any of the bad options the rest of us sometimes do.
What a dream (especially for a college-teacher-types like me and Moore, who teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) to find/create a character who sees the contradictions and pitfalls we spend our lives trying to show her and actually learns something from them.
But even the title made me tear up, by the end. As if there is any way to keep someone safe. As if it's something you can control, rather than something you get to guide for a brief time and then spend the rest of your life stepping back to watch.
It wooed me with humor, at first. Like the way the heroine, Tassie, looks back at her Wisconsin hometown:
"At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were covered with the local gemutlichkeit: dark paneling and framed deep kitsch, wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus read 'Guten Morgen.' Sauces were called 'gravy.' And the dinner menu featured cheese curd meatloaf and steak 'cooked to your likeness.'"
Or at her father:
"He was not old, but he acted old--nutty old. To amuse himself he often took to driving his combine down the county roads to deliberately slow up traffic. 'I had them backed up seventeen deep,' he once boasted to my mom."
I've been behind people like that on the two-lane highway that takes up half an hour of my usually-hour-long commute!
I have a particular fondness for college-age people, which is why I've chosen to spend my life around them, but I'm also getting to college-parent-age, so while I enjoy the irony of the way Tassie uses phrases like "Thanks, maybe later?" and "sounds good," I also enjoy the way her parents see things: "one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read The children. In some dead leaves." And, like Tassie, as a reader, I dreaded meeting high school classmates during college breaks and having them ask "'Whatcha been reading?'
'Why, I've been reading Horace!'"
There's just no way to have a conversation like that. (You know; you're readers, too!)
I laughed on every other page as I read the first half of this novel, no doubt annoying those around me, who less and less often asked what was funny after a few times of being informed that it was something like "Starbucks with its Orwellian sizing--'tall' means 'small'!"
The middle of the novel intrigued me with its love of the north, of the vagaries and varieties of cold weather. As someone who looks forward all year to heat and humidity, I found Tassie's oppression by it curious, and her appreciation of a January day revelatory: "sun sparkling off the evergreens, the air clear as a bell; it was state-of-the-art light, as noon in January sometimes could be: not rich but pale and cleansing as lemon wine."
I was also pulled farther into Tassie's world by getting caught up in her halfway position between being a sophisticated urban adult and a rural child, between loving an adopted baby as a mother and as an occasional babysitter, between learning what sexual love is and seeing it from the outside, between being the same color as almost everyone around you and seeing what it's like to be a different color. Some of the most poignant moments in the novel occur when Tassie feels what it's like to do something like "simply walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience."
Tassie asks "what was education for, if not to acquire contradictions?" And she appreciates the contradictions in her life, especially at her regular Wednesday night babysitting job at the support group the adoptive mother who employs her starts for "families of color." The bits she overhears sound to her "like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat."
Finally, though, the novel begins to wrap up with sadness layered upon sadness. One of the first sadnesses begins with a story the adoptive mother says she "has to" tell Tassie. Another has begun before Tassie even realizes it, with an email she doesn't answer. The sadness is mixed with satire, as we see the appalling cruelty of the adoption/foster care system revealed and how haphazard the road to patriotism is for one of the faces of the many troops killed in Afghanistan.
Tassie learns that "love is not enough." That "jokes were needed." That "mordancy...was something that could not really be taught. But it could be borrowed. It could be rubbed up against. It could scrape you like bark." We understand, finally why she says "I was on the side of dissent and despair." We accept that, like all the characters longing for another glimpse of the adopted baby Tassie cared for, we aren't going to get one in this novel. And yet, in the end, we see that Tassie isn't going to settle for any of the bad options the rest of us sometimes do.
What a dream (especially for a college-teacher-types like me and Moore, who teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison) to find/create a character who sees the contradictions and pitfalls we spend our lives trying to show her and actually learns something from them.
But even the title made me tear up, by the end. As if there is any way to keep someone safe. As if it's something you can control, rather than something you get to guide for a brief time and then spend the rest of your life stepping back to watch.
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