Adam Mars-Jones has this to say about LM:"The dominant influence on American short fiction when Moore started publishing was the stoic minimalism of Raymond Carver, the recovering binger's pledge of: 'One sentence at a time.' She escaped that influence, and was spared the struggle of throwing it off, but its underlying principle of whittling away excess is something her stories badly need. A Lorrie Moore story can sometimes be like a schoolroom full of precocious kids, every sentence raising both hands and squeaking: 'Me! Me! Choose me!'There's no escaping the fact that most of the outgrowths on Moore's prose, begging to be sanded down, are wisecracks, puns and jokes. In one story, the title character remembers that when she lived in New York: 'Everyone tried hard to be funny. Everywhere you went - a store, a manicure place - someone was telling a joke. A good one... it was like brains having sex. It was like every brain was a sex maniac.' Moore's humour isn't like that. It's closer to a compulsion than a talent, with the desperation of someone trying to repeat a trick that brought the house down once without her quite knowing why, and it prefers bad jokes to no jokes at all. She describes the heroine of 'Community Life' as being 'in bed, a book propped in her lap - a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information'. Forget about losing respect for the character - it's hard not to lose respect for the writer.Jokiness percolates down into the narrative voice ('It came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on'), but also bursts out whenever people open their mouths. Moore makes a number of attempts to account for this. Might it be a marker of a dysfunctional relationship? ('You see how I'm talking? Things are wacko around here.') Perhaps it's an individual pathology. ('Everything's a joke with you.' 'Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.') There may even be a deeper principle involved - 'Overheard, or recorded, all marital conversation sounds as if someone must be joking, though usually no one is.' Except that every conversation in the book, by this yardstick, qualifies as marital.Two stories in this collection stand apart, one by virtue of seeming autobiographical to the point of postmodernism, the other by taking place in a parallel universe. The first story is 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk' ( Moore never seems to have found a title arch enough to satisfy her, but surely this time she comes close). It's about the Mother, an unnamed writer of Moore's age whose baby boy is diagnosed with a kidney tumour (Peed Onk being shorthand for paediatric oncology). Her husband tells her to make notes for a story, since they may need money for the medical expenses.In theory, then, this is about a piece of life too raw to be transformed into fiction, but in practice, it's the most mannered and posturing thing in the book. The Husband says (why Husband and not Father?): 'You know, in a way, this is the kind of thing you've always written about.' The Mother agonises in a philosophical register: 'How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveller's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it.. one can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms.'The wisecracks don't actually stop, they just become grotesque, with the Mother imagining an interlocutor speaking in rebuttal: 'What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future... therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery and - let's be frank - fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels.' It's all simultaneously self-indulgent, while imagining it's writing degree zero. Towards the end of the piece, the Mother bridles at the phrase 'collateral beauty', used by the parent of another child with cancer, thinking: 'Who is entitled to such a thing? A child is ill. No one is entitled to any collateral beauty!' Except her, of course, who a page or two back was describing 'the black marbled sky and the electric eyelash of the moon'.The other story, 'Like Life', is set in a Eighties New York where it's illegal to unplug the television and the water from the taps is too caustic to bathe in, let alone drink. Young men are dying, so that women have to date men twice their age, except for Mamie, who has Rudy. This is an Aids-era story with the epidemic somehow mutated, and it's fascinating to see how removing the reference points adds to its power. Moore even goes cold turkey on the wisecracks, right up to the moment when Mamie asks Rudy what he fears, and though previously inarticulate he shoots back: 'The Three Stooges, Poverty, Obscurity, Masturbation. Also the three E's. Ennui. Anomie. Misery.' Nothing dispels atmosphere more effectively than jokes fired at random.The real tragedy is that Moore's self-presentation isn't even an original way of nullifying the threat of being female and clever in America. Nothing could be more traditional than apologising with kookiness for an intelligence too strong to be hidden. Would she really rather be cute and goofy than smart? It's a bad bargain because she cheats herself and her readers of something that had a real chance of being original and fierce."http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/g...
in "two boys" a strange young woman is seeing two very differant guys at once. it's such a weird story. really dark and sort of funny- here's an excerpt:"I mean, if I were sleeping with somebody else also, wouldn't that make everyone happy?" She thought again of Boy Number Two, whom too often she denied. When she hung up, she would phone him."Happy?" hooted Number One. "More than happy. We're talking delirious." He was the funny one. After they made love, he'd sigh, open his eyes, and say, "Was that you?" Number Two was not so hilarious. He was tall and depressed and steady as rain. Ask him, "What if we both saw other people?" and he'd stare out the window, towering and morose. He'd say nothing. Or he'd shrug and say, "Fthatz . . .""Excuse me?""Fthatz what you want." He'd kiss her, then weep into his own long arm. Mary worried about his health. Number One always ate at restaurants where the food--the squid, the liver, the carrots--was all described as "young and tender," like a Tony Bennett song. But Number Two went to coffee shops and ate things that had nitrites and dark, lacy crusts around the edges. Such food could enter you old and sticking like a bad dream. When Two ate, he nipped nothing in the bud. It could cause you to grow weary and sad, coming in at the tail end of things like that."You have everything," she said to Number One. "You have too much: money, power, women." It was absurd to talk about these things in a place like Cleveland. But then the world was always small, no matter what world it was, and you just had to go ahead and say things about it. "Your life is too crowded.""It's a bit bottlenecked, I admit."
What do You think about Like Life (2002)?
“Zoë came up, slow, from behind and gave him a shove.”The fourth story in Like Life, “You’re Ugly, Too,” is most likely Lorrie Moore’s most anthologized story. It would be interesting to try to estimate how many people worldwide own at least three copies of it. It has been printed, for instance, in: (1) Like Life; (2) The New Yorker magazine in 1989; (3) The New Yorker’s 2000 anthology of New York stories Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker; (4) the Best American series’ 2000 anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century; and (5) Moore’s 2008 Faber & Faber anthology The Collected Stories.Embracing both cynicism and dreaminess, Manhattan and flyover country, “You’re Ugly, Too” bridged for some fifty thousand or so people a gap in two distinct yet desirable sensibilities that the internet and Seinfeld would soon bridge for some fifty million or so people.“You’re Ugly, Too” hits a lot of the same notes as Moore’s other single-woman-centered stories, but there is one big difference: Evan, the sister. “‘You’re not at all like your sister,’ said Earl.”With Evan — who is the anti-Lorrie Moore heroine, the kind of sensible girl who knows how to be deferential around men, make herself appealingly simple to attract them, and not lose a single minute of sleep about it — Moore shows us that she knows that it’s not family background, or genes, or society holding her heroines back, it’s stubbornness and bitchiness and laziness and some other inexcusable and yet “lifelike” flaws.Evan is the bright and incontestable future that the internet and premier television for the masses will bring. But Zoë prefers to wallow rather than conform: to be ugly rather than “too.”-PREVIOUSLY:This was my response to Paul Bryant's review of Like Life (which is itself a reposting of Adam Mars-Jones's review of The Collected Stories in The Guardian, which is a collection of all of Moore's stories, not just the ones in Like Life): Sorry to pick a fight with you on your own thread again, but I think that the reason that some people enjoy Moore's goofball humor is that she's also pretty self-aware about it most of the time. She uses it and has her characters use it as a twitchy defense mechanism (therefore it is to mask pain, not intelligence as Mars-Jones attests). In her best stories, she overcomes the twitch altogether (in my opinion) to create something of genuine and lasting beauty.I can see how it can be jarring if you've come to her books only by hearing obscene amounts of hype about her and her wit, though.The other thing you have to know about Lorrie Moore is that many of her most ardent fans first came to her work in the context of her short stories in The New Yorker in the 80s and 90s. The Carver paragraph that you quote speaks to this, but imagine coming across "Peed-Onk" or "You're Ugly, Too" in that context and at that time and you'll see why people think she's the cat's pajamas. They're people who want to be people who like reading New Yorker stories but would rather watch another episode of Seinfeld.I wish these stories had dated better, but I think I know in my heart of hearts that they haven't.
—Stephanie Sun
Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I have a big collection of her short stories on order from Amazon, but I was glad to see this smaller, early collection hiding in the library (most places only carry Birds of America). Her writing is so poignant, incisive and witty, with such precise and startling figures of speech--I both love it and hate it at the same time, because I know I'll never achieve what she manages to in prose. Moore's gifts are luminous; that rare person who can make you laugh while you cry.
—lyn straine
"Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one."You know when a dance studio puts on its yearly showcase and you can (if it’s not a particularly serious dance studio that cares whether toes are pointed or legs are fully extended or hands look at all graceful, or whether the art of dance is killed in one afternoon) buy your kid a solo? The showcase goes on for maybe 5 hours because all the little Brittanys and Bellas and Jessicas who resemble chickens trying to escape slaughter when they dance need to have their moment in the spotlight, to gyrate in sequined hot pants like their dance idol, Miley Cyrus. Occasionally there’ll be a dancer who actually deserves a solo (maybe she’s got a hard luck story about alcoholic parents who abandoned her, but Grandma saved for years to buy her a solo, rescuing her from a life of drugs and teen prostitution). The audience will suddenly look on confused—as she in fact does something which can accurately be called “dance”—and feel a bit hopeful, but guarded, like an abused dog who’s unsure whether to trust another human being ever again. If this sounds like something you’ve begrudgingly had to sit through before (these studios that reward “pizzazz” and a girl’s ability to hold her leg next to her head without falling over, instead of oh, I don’t know, technique? The tirade could go on...) then you also know what it feels like to read most short story collections—even if you’ve never read one!Don’t get me wrong, the day I run out of Lorrie Moore books to read will be a devastating day. I’ll put her name on Google Alert and stalk The New Yorker until another gem surfaces (hopefully for free). But—there’s a lot of stage moms who bought their woefully talentless daughters solos in this showcase, if you get my drift. Some of these stories wouldn’t even seem so lackluster if “You’re Ugly, Too” and “The Jewish Hunter” weren’t freaking awesome, but they are, so there you have it. “You’re Ugly, Too” was the first story I’d ever read by Moore. It’s probably the best representation of the kind of writer she is; if you just wanna read one, read that one. I’m sure most Moore fans would say that, so nothing earth shattering there. I have heard tell the greatness that is "People Like That Are The Only People Here," but I’m circling around Birds of America, waiting to read it, like saving the best piece of Halloween candy for last (god help my mental health if that collection is disappointing). I guess if you’re on the fence about reading Like Life you should ask yourself the following: 1). Am I fairly bitter and cynical and dumbfounded of life? 2). Am I a masochist? 3). Do I like laughing at pathetic/miserable people? 4). Do I like sympathizing with pathetic/miserable people? 5). Am I pathetic/miserable? 6). Am I sarcastic? 7). Do I enjoy bad jokes? 8). Do I enjoy humor at inappropriate times? 9). Am I generally awkward? 10). Is my love life in danger of dying with my soul? If you answer any (though preferably all) of these in the affirmative, you’ll find something worth reading in this collection, and you’ll play well with Moore in the future.
—Vicki
