“There are the notes. Now where is the money?”The short story is no longer the commercial storytelling medium that it was in its heydey, but the copyright page of Birds of America is strong evidence that the short story system can still work incredibly well as an incubator of literary talent and new work. The publisher writes:Eleven of these stories were originally published in slightly different form in the following: Elle: ‘Agnes of Iowa’; Harper’s: ‘What You Want to Do Fine’ (originally titled ‘Lucky Ducks’); The New York Times: ‘Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens’ (originally titled ‘If Only Bert Were Here’); The New Yorker: ‘Beautiful Grade,’ ‘Charades,’ ‘Community Life,’ ‘Dance in America,’ ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here,’ ‘Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,’ and ‘Willing’; The Paris Review: ‘Terrific Mother’Widely considered Moore’s strongest book to date, Birds of America benefited from Moore’s collaborations not just with her Knopf editor Victoria Wilson, but with an additional eight talented periodical editors, including George Plimpton and Bill Buford.(The one story in Birds of America not listed above, “Real Estate,” was published in The New Yorker in August 1998, as part of the book’s public roll-out.)These collaborations seem to have brought a welcome discipline to Moore’s work, deepening the end result. What was once “merely” clever has become wise, and what was merely striking has become clear and true.Dave Eggers in his review in Salon summed up Moore’s concerns best, somehow capturing both the darkness and tongue-in-cheek humor of her vision in a single bulleted list: Moore’s stories are about these things:• Longing• Suffering• People mistakenly dropping babies on their head in such a way that the baby dies• Depression, or at least life’s way of sort of stalling at middle age• Depression, or at least life’s way of sort of stalling during that period just before middle age• Depression, or at least life’s way of stalling at any age at all, really• Marriages and affairs that are hopeless but serviceable, like a scratchy, Army-issue blanket• Creature comforts in the face of unfaceable pathos• Lives that would warrant suicide if the owner could find the inspiration• Friends who make you laugh• Easy puns• At least one person per story with cancer• Perhaps a child with cancer, tooThere are other writers who successfully tackle similar material, are funny, and are also better (or at least more consistently good) than Moore at other fundamentals like character development, social commentary, and plot. As part of the argument for reading Birds of America—its contemporary setting—fades with time, one is forced to consider the overall value of the offering here. Birds was a standout book of 1998, sure, but should this be included among the stories that students of the future use to access Clinton-era America in the way that students of today access the Gilded Age via Fitzgerald and Waugh?It doesn’t take much time browsing through the book with this question in mind to surface ample evidence that the correct answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’Take the subtitle of what is perhaps Moore’s most iconic work, the Bill Buford-edited “People Like That Are the Only People Here”: CANONICAL BABBLING IN PEED ONK.The urination- and pig-sound-looking “Peed Onk” is, we find out, what people embedded in the world of Pediatric Oncology call Pediatric Oncology because, presumably, they must say the words that mean “the treatment and study of tumors in children” so often that they have shortened the phrase for convenience and also have become numb to it. Moore, by including it in its most juvenile and ridiculous incarnation in the subtitle and then revealing its horror halfway through her story, very effectively calls attention to the increased jargonization of everyday American language, and by extension the increased commodification and conformity of everyday American life.Peed Onk, like much of modern progress, is a double-eged sword, something that Moore explores explicitly in the coda to “People Like That,” whose tacked-on feeling is deceptive. Indeed, the coda, with its perplexingly anti-social message, is perhaps the point of the story. The character known as The Husband asks the character known as The Mother what she thinks about the other brave Peed Onk parents as they leave Peed Onk with child in remission in tow: “‘Don’t you feel consoled, knowing we’re all in the same boat, that we’re all in this together?’”Surprising The Husband and the reader, The Mother replies in the negative: “‘Let’s make our own way,’ ... ‘and not in this boat.’”Conformity (even in the context of the courageous endurance to be found at cancer bedsides) equals death. That’s as fierce of a rallying cry for the survival of iconoclasm, and iconoclasm as survival, as anything Frank Sinatra crooned.Lorrie Moore: American as a flipped bird. Who knew?-PREVIOUSLY:These stories shouldn't work. They are riddled with twitchy wordplay and characters without clear motivations, who seem to revel in their own mediocrity or other middleness (middle age, middle America).My favorite story in this collection is about a childless woman who accidentally kills her friend's baby, accepts her boyfriend's spontaneous marriage proposal in order to accompany him to an academic retreat in Italy, and then gets lots of massages. And it is somehow hilarious, brilliant, romantic, heartwarming, and a page-turning read.I can't promise that it's everyone's cup of tea, and I know it isn't, but I've found plenty of re-read value in this book, as well as wisdom about relationships and enduring crisis.
In Birds of America, Lorrie Moore is doing so many things exceptionally that it seems like folly to criticize the rare thing that might not be working. The characters are unique and finely drawn. The plots of the stories don't fall into the trap of being just academic-y or literary fiction-y (she's even willing to wander into the potentially maudlin/saccharine Dying Kid Territory, a place in which she happens to fluorish). The dialog is snappy and, at times, funny. The stories have a point. So why did it so often feel like it was a chore to read this?Take, for example, this line from "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens": "Aileen shrugged. The whiskey she'd been drinking lately had caused her joints to swell, so that now when she lifted her shoulders, they just kind of stayed like that, stiffly, up around her ears."It's a line that works to the story's benefit, as it manages to characterize Aileen--and memorably, too. But there's something a bit too well-thought-out about it, a bit too crafted, a bit too staged. Of course Aileen's shoulders didn't stay up around her ears, and if they did, it certainly wasn't due to stiff joints from alcohol consumption. But it just looked and sounded too fine for Moore to toss away.This isn't me looking for literalness in fiction; really, it isn't. It's the fact that so many of Moore's lines work like this one, showing themselves off like, ahem, finely feathered birds. There's a heart behind them, sure, but there's also this sense that Moore is a bit too in love with her own voice, her own dry sense of humor, her own way of speaking.But really, this is just the small portion of what isn't working, and when compared to the tower of what is working, well, the complaints don't really hold much weight. Moore can tell one hell of a story, and little moments in each story typically have some sort of payoff later on. She's so clearly established control of her craft that a criticism is inevitably going to be niggling and small. I quite liked Self Help, but Birds blows that collection out of the water.
What do You think about Birds Of America (1999)?
I just remember reading this book in almost one sitting, I think, waiting for my boyfriend to get home from work. It is something that winds tightly around your throat and makes you cry in short hot spurts, like, am I really reading a book right now?. After each story, almost (there are 12), I would have to set the book down and recompose myself. It is a heartbreakingly honest account of different types of loss and growth and so so beautiful."Yeah, I like them all right," he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic - drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs. "I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother." Sidra sighted, peered wistfully into her sherry. "What was your grandmother's name?" Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. "Grandma. Her name was Grandma.
—Emalie Soderback
Birds of America is a story collection by one of the most talented (but minimal) writers around, Lorrie Moore. The stories here are not big or grand or epic, but work simply as little one-act plays, exposing the inherent complexities and dramas in the everyday lives we all lead. Moore's writing style is subtle, and laced with a fantastic sense of wit; witness, for example, her slight mocking of the health fad craze in the names she creates for juice bars; or her sly commentary about the misnomer of "busy bee" in the story "Whatever You Want, Fine." Added to this wit is a keen sense of what it means to be on this earth and to interact with someone else (I'm being cliche here, because I'm no Lorrie Moore), to have an effect upon someone's life simply because you happen to walk a similar road together for awhile, and it is the way in which she explores this truth that gives her stories the weight they need to avoid being simple comic pieces. The three best stories, in my opinion, are "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens," "People Like That Are The Only People Here," and "Which is More Than I Can Say About Some People." The first story deals with a woman who has a wonderfully loving husband and a great daughter, but can't get over the loss of her cat, and so decides to undergo therapy that guarentees to "cure her by Christmas or the last session is free!" The second deals with pediatric oncology in a harrowing and moving way, about the distance illness brings between people, and the last deals with a mother and daughter, on a road trip through Ireland, and the ways in which revelations of character don't end simply because you know someone for years and years. These are wonderful, wonderful stories, the kind that make you think about your own life, examine it in the ways the characters are examined here, that affirm realizations you yourself have come to or guide you toward ones you haven't, and I don't think you can ask for much more than that from a book.
—Forrest
I really liked Lorrie Moore's "How To Be an Other Woman" (from the love stories collection I read) but I was not wowed by this book. The stories all seemed very similar - isolated, lonely people (mostly women) dealing with husbands and families and communities. I just looked at the overwhelmingly glowing reviews here on goodreads, and hmm, I just don't get it.5 stars - "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens"4 stars - the joke in "Beautiful Grade" about the professor writing Flannery O'Connor articles ("A Good Man Really IS Hard To Find," "Everything That Rises MUST INDEED Converge," "The Totemic South: The Violent ACTUALLY DO Bear It Away")-"Real Estate" (I thought I didn't like this one much until I got drunk and analyzed it)3.5 stars - a mix of "Agnes of Iowa" and "Community Life". I felt like these two were especially similar but nearly great.-"People Like That are the Only People Here"2 stars - basically everything else1 star - "What You Want To Do Fine" and "Charades"
—Liz
