OK ok ok. So I originally used to truly love Lorrie Moore stories, especially from the two collections Self-Help and Birds of America. I read Birds of America in college and read Self-Help a few summers ago from a ratty old copy I found in a free bookstore.
But recently I have read first her collected nonfiction, which ranged from perfectly good, to unnecessary, to kind of meh, to outwardly bad. I also read her most recent collection Bark and found it more or less empty. Or I was empty of a reaction.
And then this novel and short story colleciton from 1990 and 1986 respectively I think has cemented my complete lack of interest in anything else she has written. So I am going to try to explain how and why in a very unenthusiastic review.
So Like Life. I read this collection and got almost nothing out of it and don’t really recall any of the stories.
So that’s that review.
Anagrams I have more to say about. Anagrams is about a woman named Benna and a man named Gerrard. As of right now that’s all I can really tell you about them because the premise of the novel is that in each subsqeuent chapter the roles and occupations and power dynamics of these two characters are reversed. And I would have bee more interested in it in general if not for a few issues.
First, I liked the first two chapters a lot. And I didn’t really realize she was playing around with the structure of and form. In the opening, they are neighbors having a lurid but ultimately safe conversation. In the second, we seemingly jump ahead 19 months into the relationship as things are falling apart. Also, in the first story the whole of it is in third person and in the second story the whole of it is in first person, from the perspective of Benna. And so moving forward from here, I was disappointed in two ways: one, I just wanted more about this couple/not couple as they moved forward and the novel stripped that from me (and I will get back to this) and two, the plot became gimmicky by switching everything around in the ways that it did. This first point became frustrating because it reminded me so much of some relationships I’ve found myself in and for once I was interested in seeing these kinds of dynamics played back to me and relived. The second was frustrating because of the way it disrupted what I wanted from the narrative. But also, it was frustrating because I just didn’t see the point in it. I couldn’t figure out in what ways it served the narrative in any meaningful way or what it wanted to do. And because this was not clear to me, it felt empty.
So here I am looking at putting aside reading from a specific author. It’s kind of a bummer, but it seems so clearly the right move for me now. I can only assume in some other Lorrie Moore story I loved these two books and keep reading. But I am not in that one.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Anagrams-Lorrie-Moore/dp/0394552946/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=lorrie+moore&qid=1555795492&s=gateway&sr=8-11)