Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Bark, stories by Lorrie Moore

Ever since I finished Lorrie Moore's most recent collection of short stories over a month ago, I haven't been able to get the following moment out of my head:

In the final story of the collection, "Thank You for Having Me," a mother attends the wedding of her now-15-year-old daughter Nickie's former babysitter.

As they wait for the ceremony to begin, Nickie, whom her mother describes as "both keen observer and enthusiastic participant in the sartorial disguise department" remarks:

"I can't believe Maria's wearing white."
I shrugged. "What color should she wear?"
"Gray!" Nickie said immediately. "To acknowledge having a brain! A little grey matter!"

A little grey matter indeed. All too many of Moore's characters seem lacking it. They marry, and remain married, nonsensically. They divorce yet still go on vacation together, date women even though they know them to be crazy, meet for romantic weekends in Paris and leave one another alone on a sidewalk cafe without indication of what their relationship might be, now or ever.

They converse without communicating:

"All husbands are space aliens," said her friend Jan.
"God help me, I had no idea," said Kit.

***

"We cheat the power of time with our very brevity!" he said aloud to Bekka, feeling confident she would understand, but she only just kept petting the cats.

***

"I don't think you should go," he announced.
"I'm going," she said.
"We'll be giving the children false hope."
"Hope is never false. Or it's always false. Whatever. It's just hope."

Fragmented, at times shallow, always bleak, this collection haunts me.

I loved it.

Moore's characters are the people who make up my Twitter feed and my Facebook friends. (If you, dear reader, are either, I assure you -- I don't mean you. I mean those other followers and friends, obvi.) They are the bits and pieces that all of our lives are reduced to while, increasingly, the only reflections of ourselves and our purpose that we really see are nothing more than selfies.

Her stories are tales from a world of online dating where it's totally acceptable and expected that men will exploit women and bad movies about weddings that are masquerading as feminist comedy and weddings that mean more than marriages and require their own websites and hashtags.

Her stories become the easy meaninglessness of modern life all boiled down into tales that makes their real emptiness stand out in stark relief against what stories used to mean, and might, if Moore has any say in it, one day mean again.

In the end of "Thank You for Having Me," the woman observes:

Ian played "Here comes the Bride." The bridesmaids were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn't I thought of that? Why hadn't I thought of that until now?

How brilliant. The idea that we anesthetize ourselves with psychotropic drugs and bridesmaids' dresses alike -- each woman gets to pick her own style and shade! what a fantastic celebration of her individuality! -- these are the stories Moore is telling. But her caustic tone and precise prose do not allow us to accept these stories.

Instead, they challenge them. Where is the real meaning? Is there a future ahead of us where hope does indeed matter again? Will we make sense, will we communicate, will we empathize, or are we doomed to remain safely clad in the trappings of individuality that are, in reality, the uniforms of conformity?

I hope we will.

Whatever. It's just hope.