Lorrie Moore

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.