The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Irving Malin

Lorrie Moore. Birds of America. Knopf, 1998. 291 pp. $24.00.

Perhaps the titles of Moore’s first two books offer a clue to her surprising, wonderful fiction. Self-Help and Anagrams suggest that words are our salvation, that language, artfully (re)arranged, helps us to resist those forces which we feel every day. Her style delights us; it suggests that we can—if only briefly—dance. Moore’s latest collection is her best.
In “Willing” an aging actress finds that she has lost her place in Hollywood. She now lives in a plain place; she eats, drinks, loves without any sense of hope. Only her ability to describe her condition, only her creativity rescues her from total despair. Moore describes Walter, the actress’s lover, in this way: “His mouth was slightly lopsided, paisley-shaped, his lips anneloid and full, and he kissed her hard. There were small dark pits of annihilation . . . and she threw herself into them . . . falling.” The style is jittery, vital, surprising—note the mixture of common and uncommon words, the short and long words, the “falling” of the sentence. The description—of darkness and surrender—is lively, transforming content into unexpected form.
Although I do not have the space to discuss her other stories, I must alert you to the brilliant story of cancer, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.” (That title is worthy of close reading.) The narrative is jerky; it refuses to offer the platitudes of beginning, middle, end; it spins reflexively, implying that fiction can cure us, that it is a miracle—a moment of pleasure in a conventional, dreary commonplace world. [Irving Malin]