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Flipping Xmas the bird >> Birds of America is an appropriate holiday gift by JULIET WATERS
Moore isn't as laugh-out-loud-funny as she used to be. Her vision has gotten a lot darker since her first book Self-Help. Those were witty, moody stories with titles like "How to Be a Writer," written in the imperative ("First, try to be anything else."). They weren't exactly satires of women's magazine fiction--after all, she did get a jump start as a writer by winning a Mademoiselle short story contest--but her precise dissection of the lives of mostly 20-something women cut a bit deep for the glossy page. Her dustcover photo gives her more gravitas than the "hand running through tousled curls" look of her fresh new voice days. Ten years after the publication of Self-Help, with a couple of novels and three short story collections under her belt, Moore has a well-deserved reputation as an important American writer--and pub shots that don't make her look like she just stepped out of a Clinique ad for Happy! Still, she's attractive enough to be one of the very rare writers to prompt the New Yorker to publish her picture alongside her story "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Recently, this caused some confusion when New Yorker readers unfamiliar with pictures of the author assumed the break in protocol meant that the story about a fiction writer trying to face the ordeal of her baby undergoing surgery for a tumour must be autobiographical. But Moore has always experimented with point of view. Self-Help was written almost entirely in the second person, and even though most of her stories are now written in intimate third person, she still throws in unexpected shifts in voice. At first, referring to the main characters in the story "People Like That" with nameless labels the Mother, the Baby, the Husband, the Surgeon, etc., seems like a transparent, self-conscious gimmick. The Mother is no average mother. She's also a successful novelist struggling with her own narrative instincts and with the Husband who wants her to write a story to expose the politics of the HMO and make some money just in case the Baby needs more surgery. "I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue," she tries to explain to the Husband. "I can do succinct descriptions of weather. I can do screwball outings with the family pet... I do the careful ironies of daydream. I do the the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built. But this, our baby with cancer? This is irony at it's most gaudy and careless." Later in the story this point of view is irony at its most surreal when the Surgeon tells the Medical Students that he'd like to talk to the Mother, alone. Prepared for the worst, the Mother is dazed by the Surgeon's George Clooney smile and his request that she autograph a novel she'd written about teenage girls. "I still remember parts of it!" he says. "Those girls got into such trouble!" That shift is a sigh of relief after the heartbreaking images of a baby in post-op: "It is a horror and a miracle to see him. He is lying in his crib in his room, tubed up, splayed like a boy on a cross, his arms stiffened into cardboard 'no-no's so that he cannot yank out the tubes... She has never seen a baby cry without motion or noise... it is the crying of an old person: silent, beyond opinion, shattered." The story takes place, of course, in the first few weeks of December. In some ways the ironies of the story are a bit gaudy and careless. But hey, Christmas is like that. Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, Knopf, hc, 291pp, $32
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Some books, like Lorrie Moore's latest collection of short stories, Birds of America, should be given as pre-Christmas presents. "Charades," a story about an excruciating family Christmas, might be some consolation after the gifts have been given and the tempers have been lost. And for anyone expecting a difficult time over turkey this year, it might help to arm oneself with a more Lorrie Moore perspective on life.