Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (27 page)

‘What if I wrote about this and gave my name and didn’t give yours, would that really be bad?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, and it seemed to him that she now thought the less of him.

‘And if I left out my name and gave yours, would that make it better?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

And so he did. He tried to write it all down, simply and honestly, with clean moral lines.

But still, nobody wanted to publish it.

L
ORRIE
M
OORE
is good at bad jokes. She’s good at good jokes, too, and makes many of them. But good jokes are the sign of a certain control over the world, or at least of a settled vision, the sort of vision a writer has. Good jokes are finally just jokes; whereas bad jokes are more revelatory of character and situation. Wonky puns, look-at-me one-liners, inappropriately perky comebacks: these don’t necessarily denote lack of humour, more a chin-up flailing at the discovery that the world is not a clean, well-lighted place; or that it is for some, but not for you, as the light falls badly on you and mysteriously casts no shadow.

Birds of America
, Moore’s third collection of stories, is cleverly laid out. It begins with seven stories of the kind at which she has always been supremely adept: shrewd, blackish tales of women on the edge of unravelling, smart women whose situations wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t hopeless. The uncertainly married daughter on a motoring tour of Ireland with her seemingly hyper-efficient mother; the shy librarian trying to live with a political activist and finding personal commitment as hard and strange as the wider sort; the lawyer going home for a Christmas of relentless charades and sibling dysfunction; the wife and mother trying therapy for the death of her cat, having visited ‘all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage’.

‘She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness.’ ‘She hadn’t been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She’d been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush
and told, “There you go.” ’ ‘
Blank
is to heartache as forest is to bench’ (this, naturally, from a scholastic tester). ‘She looked at Joe. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.’ As a reviewer you are tempted merely to quote your way through this emotional territory, one in which sassy, or at least wryly percipient, women get involved with slower, generally well-meaning but finally hopeless men. Life constantly refuses to show such women the plot, or give them a big enough part, or allow them to wear enough make-up in the chorus line so as not to be recognised. Love? Love turns out to be ‘flightless, dodo’, and its fault lines no less painful for being familiar. When Olena the librarian (her name is already an anagram of Alone) discovers her lover is having an affair, his justification is so puny as to be almost winning: ‘I’m sorry … it’s a Sixties thing.’ Simone, one of the robuster female characters, thinks that love affairs are like having raccoons in your chimney. How so?

There is serious pain at the edges of some of these stories (a child with cystic fibrosis, one with Down’s syndrome), but the focus is on the tribulations – bitter, occasionally veering to bitter-sweet – of the thirty-something Midwestern female. The harsher critic, lolling in the front seats like an auditioning producer, might be tempted to point and growl, ‘Fine, but
what else can you do?’ Whereupon Lorrie Moore proceeds to show us. The next two stories arrive from a male point of view (just in case we were wondering): an acrimonious academic dinner party (‘Albert indicates in a general way where they should sit, alternating male, female, like the names of hurricanes’), and a road story about a blind lawyer and a hopeless house painter scratching their way round the South. From this point the stories grow bleaker (‘He possessed a streak of pragmatism so sharp and deep that others mistook it for sanity’) and invite broader extrapolation.

Before Audubon painted his
Birds of America
, we are reminded, he first shot them. There have been stray birds all through the book, bashing into windows, being tough on the dinner plate, flightlessly embodying love. Briefly, they now waddle centre stage, as the road couple attend the famous duck parade at the Peabody hotel in Memphis and watch ‘these
rich
,
lucky
ducks’ walk their red-carpeted way from foyer fountain to elevator. And what does this pampered life point up? That ‘all the other birds of the world – the mange-hollowed hawks, the lordless hens, the dumb clucks – will live punishing, unblessed lives, winging it north, south, here, there, searching for a place of rest’.

The tonality becomes darkest in the last three stories, lit by bright truths to drive you mad. A woman in a traumatised remission from cancer; a baby with cancer; a woman who has accidentally killed a child and retreated from the deed into sudden marriage. But marriage has never been much of a haven in Mooreland, as its endurers report. ‘The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.’ ‘Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.’ Marriage, another character notes, is an institution – as in mental institution. As for cancer: we are reminded of the title story in Moore’s last collection, in which a woman is told that a mole removed from her back is pre-cancerous.
‘ “
Pre
-cancer,” she repeats. “Isn’t that … like life?” ’

‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ was the story I was most eager, but also most anxious, to reread. Eager because the subject matter – a baby with cancer – takes Moore into her toughest territory, where every pitch of tone, let alone any joke, good or bad, looks the most exposed. Anxious because when the
New Yorker
first published the story, they chose to illustrate it with a very large and fetching photograph of Moore herself. Since, in the story, the baby’s unnamed mother is a writer and a teacher living in the ‘Modern Middle West’, as Moore does, the magazine was inciting its readers, despite the ‘fiction’ strap, to treat it as a true-life account. This skewed the story and did Moore a disservice. In
Birds of America
it is freed into fiction; the rest of the book supports it, indeed builds towards it.

This doesn’t make it any the less precisely harrowing. What, after all, could be more cosmically bad-jokey than the world of Peed Onk, that jaunty, demystifying reduction of Paediatric Oncology? Here are parents preparing to bury little children, unable to take upon themselves the pain of their little bald boys (statistically, it tends to be boys), moving between guilt and terror, between tormented relaxation in the cramped Tiny Tim Lounge (which would have been larger had Tiny Tim’s child survived, rather than died, at the hospital) and the curt professional lingo of the staff: ‘It’s a fast but wimpy tumour,’ the oncologist remarks consolingly. Reflecting on the experience, the mother wonders, ‘How can it be described? … The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things.’ True, as elsewhere; and Moore gives ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here’ some light metafictional embellishments to emphasise this. But the story can only work – as it compellingly does – if it is loyal to the full tonality of the original trip, articulating its terrors and banalities, its boredom and its death-defying jokes.

Lorrie Moore has always been a clever, witty writer. The
experimentalism of her early career seems currently in abeyance;
Birds of America
is formally conservative (indeed, in only one of the stories is the main narrative even intercut with a subsidiary one). As against that, her emotional range has deepened, and the sharp vignettes of her first work have yielded to the richer thirty- or forty-page narrative. Talent and promise often remain just that, throughout a career: Truman Capote had remarkable talent and promise all his life. Moore retains the avian eye of her early books, and an unwavering sense of social tone; she is thankfully still clever and witty, but her depth of focus has increased, and with it her emotional seriousness. I hesitate to lay the adjective ‘wise’ on one of her age. But watching a writer move into full maturity is always exciting. Flappy-winged take-off is fun; but the sight of an artist soaring lifts the heart.

1

H
EARING OF JOHN
Updike’s death, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest – But I thought we had him for another ten years; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature; the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world. Though it was not as if he hadn’t left us enough to read. For years now his lifelong publishers Knopf have been giving back-flap approximations. In the mid-nineties, in a cute philoprogenitive linking, he was ‘the father of four children and the author of more than forty books’. By the time of
Early Stories
(2003) they had him, in a hands-in-the-air sort of way, as ‘the author of fifty-odd previous books’. Now, with
Endpoint
, his final collection of poems, they award him ‘more than sixty books’. Why ask for another ten years and another ten books, when even devoted Updikeans have probably only read half or two-thirds of the corpus? (I have only met one person – a British arts journalist – who has actually read
all
Updike’s books.) Nicholson Baker’s act of homage,
U & I
(1991), was impudently predicated on the fact that he’d by no means read all of Updike, or fully remembered what he had – and no, he
wasn’t going to do any extra homework before paying his tribute. It was a quirky approach, with which fellow Updikeans would sympathise; even if it did dangerously invite the act of imitation. I enjoyed Baker’s book, without feeling obliged to read it all.

But Updike’s fertility was matched by his courtesy – both as a man and as an authorial presence. His fiction never set out to baffle or intimidate – although he certainly could intimidate. Philip Roth, with memorably mock-aggrieved generosity, said of
Rabbit is Rich
:

Yet Updike always treated the reader as a joint partner in the artistic process, an adult equal with whom curiosity and delight in the world were to be shared. Departing, he left us not just one extra book, but two. It was an act of courtesy, but also of necessity. While Updike breathed, he wrote, and his entranced attentiveness to the world continued all the way to his deathbed. His final utterances, poems specifically dated from ‘11/02/08’ to ‘12/22/08’, are about hospital life, pneumonia, dead friends, needle biopsy, CAT-scan, ‘endpoint’; and the tone and truthfulness of this last looking-around –

– are both exemplary to any writer and infinitely touching to any long-term reader.

After the first shock of death came the admission that even a Nobel could guarantee only temporary permanence. (In
Bech is Back
, Izzy asks Bech if he’s ever wanted to be a literary judge. ‘ “No,” Bech admitted. “I always duck it.” “Me, too. So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.” ’) Then began a cautious, provisional assessment among Updikeans as to which of those ‘more than sixty books’ would remain after the inevitable historical shakedown. The Rabbit Quartet and the stories, most agree; beyond that, there is little unanimity. If
Couples
is his most famous single title, it is also his most contested; opponents might argue that
The Maples Stories
add up to a swifter, sparer analysis of American marriage in the same period. There are votes for
Of the Farm
and
The Coup
(my own would go to
Roger’s Version
). The man himself said (in 1985, anyway) that his own ‘particular favourite’ was the very atypical (because intrusively metaphorical)
The Centaur
. Updike’s later work was rather undervalued, and at times insultingly reviewed; perhaps
In the Beauty of the Lilies
will stay the course, or
Terrorist
(2006). The latter book has as much authorial boldness as Roth’s
The Plot Against America
, even if both share the same unwillingness to push the narrative to its logical conclusion (the Roth would thus end with the setting-up of the first American concentration camp, the Updike with the successful blowing-up of the Lincoln Tunnel). As Lorrie Moore put it, Updike is ‘arguably our greatest writer without a single great novel’ – a matter of particularity rather than any dishonour.

Updike’s stories were generally written closer to his own life than his novels; and his final collection,
My Father’s Tears
, contains numerous familiar tropes, set-ups and situations. The infant crouched on carpet or linoleum, surrounded by crayons and mammoth adults; the child of a quadrilateral household (two parents, two grandparents) which cossets and protects him; the small boy losing his mother’s hand in a department store and wetting his pants; the artistic yet temperamental
mother and the philistine yet stoical father; the key move from town (the father’s locale) to farm (the mother’s); the necessary escape from family to university, then professional life and marriage; the fathering of four children; the period of a year or so living alone in Boston; divorce, followed by a second, childless marriage; the young man with psoriasis who grows into the elderly man with sun-damaged skin; the adult whose stutter returns in times of crisis or embarrassment; the serial attender of high-school reunions; the grandfather with a tendency to get lost, whether in foreign cities or his own once-familiar, now forever-changed home environment. These set-ups are so consistent that when, in ‘Blue Light’ (ex-psoriatic grandfather with sun-damaged skin), Updike proposes a protagonist with a massive three wives and a measly three children, we rear back not so much in disbelief as mild offence. Think we can’t see through
that
? Anyway, three plus three or two plus four, it’s still six, isn’t it?