Book Review: Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

There's something about short stories, the way they straddle the narrative world of novels and the metaphorical world of poetry. Like poems, short stories tend to be about moments, about a thing, no matter how big the story might be. A good short story can pack a punch in a way that novels rarely can. Novels colonize you like a cancer; short stories have the immediacy of an aneurysm.

Lorrie Moore writes those kinds of short stories, dangerous stories that can lay you flat as you move from absurdity to tragedy to the quotidian. The 12 stories of Birds of America, published in 1998, explore the uneasiness of life — relationships and loneliness, expectation and disappointment — with a diamond-edge wit and tender humour. These combine to illustrate the nooks and crannies of life.

"For me stories are responses to little disturbances that rattle the windows, or to creatures that suddenly enter the house," Moore told the Believer. Once, a bat flew into my house and Moore's stories are indeed like that: disturbing, unsettling, off-kilter, mesmerizing and, ultimately, undeniably real. These adjectives can be as equally applied to the moods of the scenes and the temperaments of the characters. Moore's ears are finely attuned to the rattling of lost souls. Take, for instance, this description from "Agnes in Iowa":

That had been in Agnes's mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationally then, getting this job or that, in restaurants or offices, taking a class or two, not thinking too far ahead, negotiating the precariousness and subway flus and scrimping for an occasional manicure or play. Such a life required much exaggerated self-esteem. It engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Moore manages to convey the freedom and the despair of improvisational, mishmash post-college life with all the relief and nostalgia it tends to engender and she does it all in a single paragraph. Moore makes you crawl inside Agnes's skin and feel her existence. Moore's prose is full of beautiful language and surprising combinations of words.

When she describes the way a day can "vanish tragically" in the mother-daughter travel tale "Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People," I want to send the passage to every writing teacher who ever said adverbs are amateurish. Sure, to vanish magically is a cliche, but the idea of a day, its potential squandered, vanishing tragically? That's beautiful.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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