Birds of America

First of all, with Lorrie Moore: Oh, the puns!

Second of all, she doesn't really do men. There's one story in here that takes a male character's perspective, and it's one of the weakest. It's a good faith effort, but the shortcoming seems to stem from a genuine befuddlement as to how men might dwell in themselves, how they might carry themselves from one moment to the next. That's not to say she is limited as writing from a specifically gendered perspective, or that she reads like a feminine "typ

First of all, with Lorrie Moore: Oh, the puns!

Second of all, she doesn't really do men. There's one story in here that takes a male character's perspective, and it's one of the weakest. It's a good faith effort, but the shortcoming seems to stem from a genuine befuddlement as to how men might dwell in themselves, how they might carry themselves from one moment to the next. That's not to say she is limited as writing from a specifically gendered perspective, or that she reads like a feminine "type"; I don't see her able to write with sympathy from the point of view of plenty of women characters. But her signature narrative voice is so personal (and clear, the way you always know which one is the "Woody Allen character" in his movies, no matter who's playing it), built on earned experience and observation, that it isn't as compelling when she briefly inhabits a different perspective, like a tourist climbing up a bell tower to take in the vista for ten minutes before turning back, with a way of seeing that is keenly sensitive but still superficial, transient.

Now that that's off my chest, let me thirdly say that this collection has put Lorrie Moore in the top two or three of my favorite authors. When describing literature you like, it's easy to reach for superlatives ("the most insightful prose and thoughtful character exploration"; "never been a more sensitive accounting of the rhythms of emotion") in an attempt to sell your friends on it in the hope that they will read the same thing and feel how you feel when you were in the midst of it so that your sense of elevation, of light, of indigestion will be confirmed in another person, meaning that you were not after all drifting alone when you were moved, and that what you felt was real, at least in the feeling of it. But her writing, at its best, seems indifferent to where it ranks on the scales of vividness, or poignancy, or wit. She's not looking for the truth - is there any more superlative concept? She's not trying to wow you with her language (her inability to resist said puns being key evidence of that). Although she is mightily skilled in descriptive imagery, inspiration and judgment on opposite ends of the seesaw (and the former a bit heavier), the craftsmanship is not displayed for its own gaudy sake, but is the fruit of careful looking at what it means to be human. She's interested in the experience of the personal which - somehow, unexpectedly, in our never-more-self-obsessed time, is missed, either because it has fallen into another dimension, or perhaps because it doesn't exist at all. As one of her characters mouths back at "the Lorrie Moore character" at one point, "this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science." Perhaps it's enough to leave it at this: Lorrie Moore makes me want to read more and makes me daydream about writing myself someday, or never; either way, as long as I think about it.

Lastly, there's the crush. There's an episode of Entourage in which a woman meets and goes to bed with Vinnie Chase and, the next morning, explains to him, after his surprise at learning that she is engaged and imminently to be married, that she and her fiancé have an understanding that, given the opportunity, they are allowed to sleep with specific celebrities on a pre-defined and pre-disclosed list; Vince is on the list. Were C and I to have a similar arrangement, I would be tempted to include Ms. Moore. And maybe not really for the soggy awkwardness of a surely underwhelming (from her perspective) physical encounter, but at least for the chance to buy her a drink, tell a few jokes, maybe offer her a shot of wry - and be flirted back at for a half hour or so. I saw a comment on a youtube clip of a talk she was giving that she "makes disdain beautiful." Maybe it's just the rarified glamour of being a commercially successful art fiction writer who's also fetching, but I have to agree - wise, mordant, so wonderfully Irish. Sigh.