“A Bite Is Always Worse”: Nine Perfect Sentences by Lorrie Moore -The Toast

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images1. “The sap of the stick-bare trees was just stirring after what looked like a fierce fire of a winter.”

Ideally, the short story is to be looked at more than read. Its sentences should dip and preen like the vainest gulls, or approximate a master’s immaculate brushwork. Plotty short stories of the non-pulpy kind tend to be overdetermined pileups of hemming and hawing, if not himming and her-ring. If the realism doesn’t have a marine layer of catatonia, one is often left cold and wondering how the life of a character, not to mention one’s reading time, could possibly be both so wasted and so brief.

Andy Butler of Hercules & Love Affair once compared early house tracks, particularly ones on Murk Records, to fine art–“There was an elegance, a subtlety, a sophistication to that music.” The best short stories have the same hung or suspended quality, occupying space with little regard to weight or volume, holding only your eyes with elegance, subtlety and sophistication.

If her literary cotillion wasn’t winning Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest at 19, it was the graduate thesis that became Self-Help, Lorrie Moore’s first collection of willowy structures. Its iconic use of the second-person makes those stories pop like blemishes on your own face. That collection made me want to write fiction. While it doesn’t employ second-person, Bark is the latest in that vein–technically enthralling while putting out little fires all over your body.

Talking to Dazed & Confused about emotional quotas in her shortform work, Moore cited the importance of happy textures to largely sad content–’otherwise it’d be unbearable.’ This factor is generally found in pop music. Moore also knows that heat in winter can be devastating.

2. “Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disrupted, and so the funniness of which was never ending.”

If men in the usual fictions can be said to live lives of quiet desperation, then the women in Moore’s live lives of quiet exasperation. Men are constantly more behind than ahead of these women, who have taken the familiar language of the newly left and seduced it into something shrewdly and ironically else.

url-13. “Of course she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space alien values, space alien thoughts, and the hollow shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.”

On a recent episode of Girls, Hannah Horvath’s dying grandma does a bit about husbands and wives: “Someday you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being, wishing that he would die the most violent death possible.” It’s very funny! Still, realizing that men were born on third base while women are expected to hit a triple is what makes Moore’s primary characters appear flushed of all conceit, played out by men who have forgotten the rules of the game.

In the story “Paper Losses,” a former married couple agree to one last vacation even though their divorce is pending; their acrimony lurks like a shark near the beach they lie on. A space formerly shared has been blown to giant shards: a little weight gained, a wedding ring that won’t quite come off, a knowing snarl. A friend of the narrator says, “There’s no such thing as Men. Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is–well–a capacity for horrifying violence.” That, and Moore’s other narrators would reliably add, a coercion toward missing the point. For instance, only a man would insist that bay leaves are bullshit.

4. “The suitcase stayed at the table, like a bomb.”

The stories in Bark are sometimes set in the surreal Bush years, waiting for Baghdad to erupt or the Sears Tower to theoretically fall. The de facto title story, “Debarking,” is from the only third-person male POV in the series. It’s that of Ira, who has a meltdown in a bar on Easter 2003, appalled by televised bombing[s] and Dick Cheney’s tax return. “Subject To Search” is a restaurant set-piece starring a ridiculously entertaining pair of diplomats who double as raucous lovers. He mansplains Chiang Kai-shek when she asks about the Shah of Iran; she likes him anyway. She speaks shitty French; he, whose expertise is in languages, likes her anyway. He plants a gushy Peggy Lee-transcribing notebook in the bathroom and then insists that it, the notebook, is hers. “That it seemed hilarious,” Moore writes, “made her think, This has always been the man for me.” All of this is outlay for a discussion of Abu Ghraib, by the way.

George W. Bush’s fratty image superimposes perfectly over Moore’s typical tensions; often her women practice the kind of affectionate misandry which has plenty of fight but is still capable of finding barbecue-in-teeth dolthood endearing. It has occurred to me that George and Laura themselves had, and presumably still have, a sort of Lorrie Moore marriage. Think of Laura calling George ‘Mr. Excitement’ and herself ‘a Desperate Housewife’ at the 2005 White House correspondent’s dinner and the words ‘amicable split’ have never seemed like more of a honeymoon. Or think of Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Friendship After Love,” which begins: “After the fierce midsummer all ablaze/Has burned itself to ashes, and expires/In the intensity of its own fires/There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days/Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.” Couples who have no reason to be together are usually the most fascinating. Anyway I want Moore to report on the former president’s upcoming gallery debut really bad.

5. “Audiences booed–the boys in their red-framed spectacles, the girls in their crooked little dresses.”

This annihilating note from the indiesphere made me wonder how much time Moore spent at Glasslands before she moved to Nashville. “Wings” is Bark‘s longest piece and the most sentence-to-sentence excellent. An aging alt named KC, who does things like name her dog Cat and perform hip-hop versions of Billy Joel, befriends an old man who lives nearby. This development annoys her simp boyfriend, Dench. KC used to think Dench was a drug dealer; most women have at one point suspected their male partners of being drug dealers.

6. “She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it.”

More than any other in the collection, the foregone sentences remind me of ones from “How To Be An Other Woman,” Moore’s masterpiece from Self-Help: “When you were six you thought MISTRESS meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.”

7. “The change of seasons had brought new viruses and he was waterboarding himself with a neti pot.”

Moore is renowned for possessing a wicked sense of language as a Nabokovian game. Both mechanically and in terms of sheer joy the above compares to ‘he exhaled a megaphone of smoke’ from the Nabokov story “Wingstroke.”

8. “The end of love was one big zombie movie.”

The ‘ie’ mimesis unites two words you might see together all the time but would never think of as a couple. If love as meal that never ends is the feelsiest of masculine fantasies, its ending as entropic feeding frenzy is a woman’s worst nightmare.

9. “Overhead the dirt pearl sky of March hung low as a hat brim.”

When even the weather is self-effacing, all you can do is layer.

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Anthony Strain is a writer in Los Angeles. He is not working on a screenplay.

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