Lorrie Moore

I went upstairs and with all my cheery clothes on got back into bed. It still smelled a little of the man. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there, every muscle of my body strung taut. I could not move.

But I must have fallen asleep, and for some time, because when I heard the doorbell downstairs and pulled the sheet off my face it was already dark, though the sun set these days at four, so it was hard ever to know by just looking out the window what time it might possibly be.

"I must have fallen asleep..." I mean, come on! I guess I see it as a consoling fiction she's allowed herself, in much the same way that the woman in 'Anagrams' invents an imaginary daughter.

(The Grimm Bros 'Juniper Tree' also features someone coming back from the dead, in a quite gruesome way, and perhaps that's the best genre in which to place the story - a kind of sardonic fairytale of consolation.)

Ooh, I like that, Jerry! Yeah, and the whole visit with the dead friend was a really accurate description of a dream. How her friends all knew what to do, and the police car, and the things that her dead friend was saying to her. It reminded me of dreams I have had. Even though it was a dream though, it was still the ghost of her friend. I mean, they all knew that she was dead. The only ghosts I ever see are in my dreams. I kinda wish she would write a real ghost story. Every great writer should write a couple.

I still have not read this story. I will when I can.

David E, you make your point well - it's true, how the different characters are the same character. Which I (suddenly) suppose Anagrams self-consciously stages?

while we're all on about sardonic fairytales, has anyone read her children's book, The Forgotten Helper?

Skidders - you quite often see Moore things in remaindered bookshops at a 'Nice Price'. I would lend you my copy of 'Birds of America', which you really should read next, but it is a signed first edition which I am reluctant to let out of my sad, sweaty fanboy mitts.

A bit Lorrie-by-numbers, I think.

That New Yorker story does seem fairly representative of her stuff, but even when her stories are a bit same-y, she still has the ability to create a specific mood and come up with some lovely lines.

Like Life was the first of hers that I've read. Any suggestions of which to try next? Are her novels as good as her stories?

That new story has a great first line.

But I have liked other stories of hers I've read. "People Like That..." and "You're Ugly Too." I think I'm suffering from an extended bout of collection fatigue, in her case.

anyone read the new book yet?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

can't wait!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51LtWv2%2B3RL._SS500_.jpg

lethem raves today in the nyt book review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Lethem-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

want to read this very much.

yes, totally

WANT!

<3 u lorrie

So has anybody else read this yet? Finished it last night. Really enjoyed it, but had some reservations (the 'Brazilian' character subplot's conclusion seemed especially bizarre).

Nobody? Bugger.

SORRY! i've been busy and haven't been to a bookstore. i do obviously want to read it.

Well, alright then.

english cover is rubbidge

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514iyBr410L._SS500_.jpg

i can't decide if i like her or not anyway

I want to read it but hardbacks are for rubes

i find english covers are usually worse than american ones - 2666's looked terrible

havent even seen this in the bookshops over here tho

book designs in britain have fallen into this horrible standardised waterstones series of looks : /

i didn't mind the 2666 one specifically, it was sort of brute in a way that suited the book: on the other hand i did bother to order in the three-volume edition so er

i am really liking hardbacks lately and replacing some of my old books with them ha

she's coming to town to read sunday, and i'll be away. life = pain

i was going to wait to get this from the library but my work gave me a borders gift card so i just went crazy and got it. not that far into it but enjoying it. having read the story in the new yorker, it's interesting how the short story isn't just an isolated unchanged chapter in the novel but how she expanded the short story, adding a lot of extra details in there, "fattening" it up

A friend of mine passed this book on to me saying "see if you hate this as much as I did."

I haven't looked at it yet. I read a few pages of the frog hospital book and it turned me off right away, but I notice that nowhere in all the Lorrie-love above is that book mentioned. Did anyone else have trouble with it? The humor seemed a little try-hardy. I should read other stuff, I guess.

Other stuff of hers.

frog hospital is definitely not my favorite thing shes ever done but i was still able to get through it

i was into frog hospital but like max said, it's not her best. re: the humour - it's pretty much like that thru all her books so if you dont like it, she might not be for you

Actually, I really loved 'Frog Hospital', while having reservations about the new one. I suspect the closer to novella length the better.

'a gate at the stairs' was good

I read most of Self-Help this summer but can't bring myself to finish it, though I know should read "How To Be A Writer" cuz it's really famous and all, but right now she's kind of like that one friend who's always, without fail, no matter what time of day or year, witty and pithy and ironic, and my quip quota, I guess, is filled, for now.

― W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, November 1, 2006 12:06 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark

^^ I've only read the abovementioned piece but can already see how this will hold true in the future. atm I don't have this kind of friend in my life, so I'll happily source a copy of birds of america.

She is (now) one of my top fav writers, fwiw. I can, and do, still OD on her, like it'll be a while bc I read the new novel in Jan, but that's ok.

finally read a gate at the stairs. did not like it :(

felt bad about not liking it. but i am only human and so is lorrie.

the yuppie-couple-with-dark-secret thing Did Not Work For Me

most of the book felt like a bad tv drama i think

none of it added up for me. seemed too patchwork or something. (or like a short story writer trying to stitch 3 or 4 stories into a novel) the 9/11 stuff too...didn't work. for me. and only one big laugh! certainly a new low from a writer who has made me laugh several times in the course of one 5 page story. (the line about her father getting less respect than the ginseng farmers, that was it. the only chuckle i got in the whole book.) and the couple...i mean, i guess they were supposed to be really unlikeable? but still, nothing to hold on to. didn't care about their baby situation at all. and even the voice of our hero seemed...sketchy. who was she really? didn't get a good sense. i guess the farm/family stuff worked the best. wouldn't have minded a long novella about college girl going back home to her weird rural family.

I still don't get why she included the boyfriend subplot--so wildly misjudged

this was disappointing... i mean, i liked the story at its core but i found the language really wishy washy and the characters unbelievable. and the narrator - i just didn't find her well-constructed at all.

seems like most ppl dont like it here :( i still havent picked it up

Just finished the book. Tend to agree with the criticisms.

She can still write beautifully, better than anyone in a way. Though the beautiful writing can also seem random and weightless.

The basic milieu here - Mid-Western college girl's life in early 2000s - seems deeply appealing to me.

But the book is a strange mess:
1. the Thornwood-Brinks are odd characters - maybe this is a literary feat, neo Gothic as Stevie T said, but the oddness seems to unbalance things, and they don't exactly get wrapped up or properly explained at all; after the baby is taken away they virtually vanish.

2. the Brazilian / Afghan / Muslim / whatever bf - what a strange folly. The scene where Tassie finds him in his apartment on his laptop preparing to join a jihadist cell in London is one of the maddest things that LM has ever written. It makes me wonder, this book, whether LM has always been writing mad stuff, and it just shows up more here ... maybe cos of the book's rare length? Interested in others' thoughts on that.

3. the musical element, Tassie and Murph writing songs - doesn't ring very true to me.

4. worst of all, I think, the incredibly confused handling of the brother's subplot. In the last 30pp or so, the family is overwhelmed with grief for him - the grief is described quite sensitively and eloquently. But they didn't seem to care about him when he was alive. Tassie ignore his email asking whether he should join the army, doesn't seem that bothered when he joins the army, then is overwrought when, in the army, he gets killed ... come on, this doesn't make any sense. He doesn't even have any strong motive for joining save some kind of economic one (wants to pay for college) - which is real enough, but would it make a middle-class lad want to join the army and go to fight in a distant and deadly land? And why aren't the parents more bothered about it, given their eventual response to the death?

It just doesn't make any sense !!!

coffin scene would have made a great short story set-piece. instead of a novel, she could have written 4 or 5 good short stories with the material she had. brother's death short story. visiting mom and dad on the farm story. being a nanny for uptight restaurant owner short story. little kid on the highway short story. but she did what she did...

they could have been linked too. the stories. ditch the terrorist boyfriend all together.

plus, most vague and underwritten main character ever! which can work okay in a short story. i didn't even believe that this person played the bass! everything about her seemed random. all the details. and i didn't know her at all by the end.

Pretty much have to agree with that assessment!

I don't believe she played bass guitar either.

the lives of midwestern college girls in the early 2000s, also of particular interest to me.

scott totally otm

'places to look for your mind'

continues my sense that LIKE LIFE is not the best of LM.

It has an English character who talks in a Dick-Van-Dyke kind of way

and a US woman who is rather patronized and made just to look daft by the narrative voice.

But I thought ANAGRAMS was before LIKE LIFE and I admired that greatly!

She wrote about Friday Night Lights in NYRB recently.

i am reading like life, mildly bemused to find the pinefox had revived this thread nine months ago to make much the same points i was going to make, huh

i consider like life and anagrams her juvenilia.

or wait no i think i mean self help and anagrams. her 80's stuff.

oof reading what i wrote about that last book...makes me sad. i wanted to love it!

i think the 80s pair are more assured than 'like life', on current showing; probably if i hadn't read 'birds' before i'd like it more -- it seems to be in the same mode but not quite there yet: a little glib, some lapses of attention, some overly story-ish things happening

apparently she shows up every once in awhile at the bar down the block for grad student things, i'm sure i wouldn't recognize her though

she looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dz7kbgH6T8

"about as happy as she got -- a sigh with some light in it"

it has taken me until p194 to 'get' the title of 'a gate at the stairs'

also i kinda liked it

pinefox's point four above is like the epitome of pinefoxian-bafflement-via-misprision, i think

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/60360-the-leaping-mind-lorrie-moore.html

test

Another profile:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/books/lorrie-moores-new-book-is-a-reminder-and-a-departure.html?ref=arts

The story 'Foes' in BARK is one of the most entertaining fictions I think Lorrie Moore has written in a long time.

I loved Bark when I read it but I realised while I was reading it that it was very much in the same way that I love a new album by a band that sounds comfortingly similar to their other loved material. When I'd read my fourth or fifth story in a row in which characters exchanged delightful verbally-inventive quips I started to wonder whether or not they were doing this because the character or situation actually demanded it, or just because that's what characters in Lorrie Moore stories do. I was very rarely not entertained (and her skewering of a kind of 00s US indie rock mentality is a lot more adept than, say, Jonathan Franzen's) but I started to wonder whether this was a writer content to operate within her comfort zone.

In general I feel she's at her weakest when she's at her most explicitly political - the second half of Gate At The Stairs, etc, and found the twist involving the antagonist in Foes to be a slightly cheap shot as far as narrative devices go.

the capitalization of BARK confused me and made me think we were discussing a literary journal

I do remember having to put down the book after reading the first paragraph and just thinking "I am so happy I'm reading this", it was like listening to a New Order record and hearing a new Peter Hook bassline for the first time, you know exactly what it's going to do but in the moment it feels perfect.

DC I basically agree but isn't that roughly what one might have felt about LM for about 15 years?

The Rock thing you mean, I assume, is in the 'Wings' story?

Probably agree re politics, but 'Foes' is tremendously written and funny !

Only realized toward finishing 'Wings' that it was a rewrite of Henry James.

Odd that it's a song about ROCKERS but is presumably not a joke about the band WINGS.

If only Peter Miller were here to humour me.

And 'Referential' is 'after VN' which I take is Nabokov - which story, I am unsure, but there seems to be an 'intertextual exercise' motif here.

remembered what I was going to say about 'Wings' -

I didn't really get - or believe! - the motivation esp of the central woman, right up to her final dealings with the house

although I realize that 'the mystery of motivation', 'the ambiguity of people's desires' is the Jamesian schtick she is referring to.

I've only just seen this 2009 review of LM, by a notable writer on climate breakdown. Well informed and worthwhile I think.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lives-lorrie-moore/

“I feel like I’ve got five years to live,” says Agnes, in “Agnes of Iowa,” having made a brief go of things in New York. “So I’m moving back to Iowa so that it’ll feel like fifty.”

That is so good.