Death Is All Around
Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
Faber, 195pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780571273850
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Towards the end of Lorrie Moore's fourth novel, its doubly bereaved central character asks, in defiant inverse of the classical philosophical query first posed by Leibniz, 'why is there now nothing rather than something?' In a world where popular sentiment hears only a wrong note in the word 'died' , what happens to those who pass, pass on, pass away, leave us, vanish? Newly bereft of both his nearest and his dearest, Finn finds himself reflecting on what it all adds up to. 'Suffering then vanishing. Did everyone understand that that's what they had signed up for, or really just not signed up at all but been drafted?' Nobody is talking about an afterlife here. What happens to the vanished in the hearts and minds of those left behind?
Moore has been addressing death in one way or another throughout her fictional career. Her previous novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), turned on the death of a four-year-old at the hands of a furious parent. The parents in her short story, 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk', from Birds of America (1998), have their child's cancer to deal with, as well as the anonymous medical process through which they must put him. A compact tale about a wedding, 'Thank You for Having Me', which closes her last collection of shorter fiction, Bark (2014), begins with its first-person narrator memorialising the death of Michael Jackson, adding, in a note of what used to be called dramatic irony, 'Well, at least Whitney Houston didn't die’.
Death is all around for Moore's characters, and so the feeling grows. Unlike life, it turns out to be 'sort of what you make of it', according to Finn's recently deceased ex-lover Lily, speaking none too authoritatively from beyond the unmarked eco-grave in which she has been buried. Meanwhile, to those still on this side, mourning does not proceed through measurable Kübler-Ross stages — from denial to acceptance, as theorised — but just goes on changelessly, a miserable unvarying portion, 'a kind of sad soup of the day'. These are the words of the middle-aged Finn, who teaches history and math, is losing faith in the system, and is losing both his emotionally disturbed former lover, Lily, and his terminally ill elder brother, Max. Neither the staff at Lily's mental health facility, nor the young African boys who work at Max's New York City hospice, and certainly not the Valkyries of Lily's book group, guiding her soul to a nameless Valhalla, where men can't keep letting her down, are capable of explaining death for the despairing Finn. They can only make things appear less horrible, in so doing reinforcing the banal horror of inoperable tumours and suicide..
The tone that Moore strikes in the face of death, in this latest work as in her earlier fiction, is anything but elegiac. She is forensic to a fault in precipitating the absurdity out of death's imminence, as well as its mendacious finality, in a style that does nothing to soften their impact. Returned from the grave, Lily's body is full of gaseous decay and corrupt odours, 'her skin pale as tallow, her eyes gold as chicken fat . . . she seemed a sweet and putrid gouache'. There is supposedly a nobility in being able to face death, be it ever so torturously slow or obscenely sudden, the intuition that prompts mourners to write something lovely in the remembrance book or on Facebook, an instinct children must begin to learn when the labrador dies. Max and Finn's mother had it on her deathbed: 'paralyzed by tumor-induced stroke, [she] looked beautiful and brave and gave Finn a wink that let him know she was in on everything.' Death is a big event for Moore's people, but what encloses it is too small to contain it, so that it spills out clumsily and makes a mess. Getting it wrong is the last word in tastelessness. 'The whole Enterprise of Life was snooty and didn't really want that much to do with death. Death made Life look bad.’
Lily's two suicide attempts, undertaken by the same method in an institution where every means of self-harm has been prudently removed from her, test physiological credulity, but death after all, like truth, will out. When she makes a nocturnal return from a state of limbo that appears to have survived its Protestant abolition, she and Finn undertake an epic road trip, in which there is time to dissect the dysfunctionality and wreck of their relationship, her turning to another man, her work as a clown-costumed bereavement counsellor, the whole tacky dialectic of comedy and tragedy, the abraded line between wanting to live and not wanting to want to. Along the way, they stop at a scuzzy motel, where Finn happens on a bound collection of handwritten letters from the 1870s, in which a woman who signs herself 'Eliz' wrote reflective, revealing missives to her sister, but apparently never mailed them. These are dropped in at regular intervals among the scenes between Finn and Max, and between Finn and Lily. The letters too are full of deaths, not least the recent assassination of President Lincoln. Eliz runs a rooming-house, in which one of the residents, Jack, a well-spoken theatrical type who wears a velvet cape, appears to have his eye on her. The twin themes of hopeless desire and death wind through her narratives too, but her phlegmatic approach to both stands in stark tonal contrast to Finn's fumbling inarticulacies.
The present-day narrative actually takes place in the fall of 2016, on the eve and after the fact of America's most calamitous modern presidential election. It is a world that was already way out of whack before Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Its madness is especially lurid in the educational context, it seems to Finn; linguistic safe spaces have been created to acknowledge all varieties of cultural sensitivity, because schools themselves are anything but safe, as one mass shooter after another reminds us. He wonders whether there may be some mileage in teaching a history course based on the actual conspiracies that lie behind the one-damn-thing-after-another of history. There is nothing like a hard-edged conspiracy for scything through the gossamer tangles of mere conspiracy theories.
Lorrie Moore's imagistic writing achieves a dexterous balance of the poetics of yesteryear with the internalised technologies of the modern world, producing lightweight load-bearing sentences that might be missed by the plot-conscious reader. How to show a flurry of birds? 'Grackles ascended in a scatter with their weird groupthink, swirling.' The night sky? 'The dippers, the gods, the warriors all flickering about the ambiguous emoji of the moon.' The messy foliage of trees seen from a moving car? 'Out the window the bedheads of the keening, windblown trees waved their branches in screeching, stretching yawns.' It is a pliant, capacious language that makes no distinctions between solemnity and levity, which mutually inform each other all the way to the closing funeral at which Finn delivers an oration. 'He looked out at the congregation and saw some worried faces. He knew then that he sounded insane to absolutely everyone.' If the disjointed relation to social reality, viewed with a fatalistic irony, is a familiar theme in contemporary American fiction, from Deborah Eisenberg to Callan Wink, Moore is one of its virtuoso performers.
Some critics have felt that her longer fiction lacks narrative integrity, that she sets up a promising scenario and then lets it get out of hand through over-complication. Nicole Lamy in the Harvard Review wrote of A Gate at the Stairs that '[t]ragedies mount like a pileup on the interstate .. .Each strand could have been its own short story, but together they fail to connect. Readers are left with a kind of Big Issues soup.' . There is an improvisational quality to I Am Homeless, but this novel essentially consists of two dramatic scenes played out in dialogue rather than action. The development takes place at the level of how characters' attitudes to their predicaments, including the remorseless demise of their loved ones, play out. There may not even be any great revelation, only another angle on the same immovable reality, perhaps one that, in Finn's case, involves imaginatively moving it out of its reality and into a realm where a converse with the dead may take place, the chance not to say everything that was left unsaid, but to discover that it really couldn't have been said in any conclusive or consoling way after all. What matters is the change of angle. 'I am not homeless,’ reads the notice by the mendicant's money-jar on the subway. 'This is my home.’
Despite all the mortality, Moore is still a skilled comedian. Finn's landlady has asked him to find a new toilet for his apartment, a scene that involves him sitting on one lowered seat after another in a toilet showroom, at the unsettling behest of a salesman, 'like taking crap after crap right there in the store'. Suffering an auto breakdown in the middle of the night, he thanks the car mechanic who gets the engine going again in what seems the only appropriate manly way, by kissing and hugging him. 'A beautiful man. A man beautiful to behold. Finn wanted to marry him. He never wanted to be without him.' The misjudgement of tone, the awkward moment that fails to resolve, the minor misunderstanding that lasts a lifetime, the faintly crazed funeral tribute: these are the stock-in-trade of Moore's principal characters. In the midst of death, they are in life, which suffers by the comparison. But just as fatuous indignity looks to be as ineluctable as mortality, they find moments of unmediated emotional truth, in clichés and song-lyrics. spikes of cynical wisdom and sudden cries of angry pain. 'I want you in the world, where you belong,' a desperate Finn tells the departing Lily's ghost. She thinks the world where she belongs may well be the one where she is now going, and his anger can't reel her back. 'Baby,' she tells him, you've lost that lovin' feeling.' Soon after, she bids him a last farewell, holding out the hope of an occasional return in the manner of Emily Brontë's Cathy, via Aretha Franklin:
If it is all too easy to imagine that the dead would rather not come back again, especially where, like Lily, they have chosen their own exits, Finn's comfortless tears, his sense of his own inadequacy delivering his brother's eulogy, remind him that nothing is ever truly over. This could be a source of solace, in that the departed live on in our hearts, but it is also the caustic reminder that that isn't enough.
Moore has been addressing death in one way or another throughout her fictional career. Her previous novel, A Gate at the Stairs (2009), turned on the death of a four-year-old at the hands of a furious parent. The parents in her short story, 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk', from Birds of America (1998), have their child's cancer to deal with, as well as the anonymous medical process through which they must put him. A compact tale about a wedding, 'Thank You for Having Me', which closes her last collection of shorter fiction, Bark (2014), begins with its first-person narrator memorialising the death of Michael Jackson, adding, in a note of what used to be called dramatic irony, 'Well, at least Whitney Houston didn't die’.
Death is all around for Moore's characters, and so the feeling grows. Unlike life, it turns out to be 'sort of what you make of it', according to Finn's recently deceased ex-lover Lily, speaking none too authoritatively from beyond the unmarked eco-grave in which she has been buried. Meanwhile, to those still on this side, mourning does not proceed through measurable Kübler-Ross stages — from denial to acceptance, as theorised — but just goes on changelessly, a miserable unvarying portion, 'a kind of sad soup of the day'. These are the words of the middle-aged Finn, who teaches history and math, is losing faith in the system, and is losing both his emotionally disturbed former lover, Lily, and his terminally ill elder brother, Max. Neither the staff at Lily's mental health facility, nor the young African boys who work at Max's New York City hospice, and certainly not the Valkyries of Lily's book group, guiding her soul to a nameless Valhalla, where men can't keep letting her down, are capable of explaining death for the despairing Finn. They can only make things appear less horrible, in so doing reinforcing the banal horror of inoperable tumours and suicide..
The tone that Moore strikes in the face of death, in this latest work as in her earlier fiction, is anything but elegiac. She is forensic to a fault in precipitating the absurdity out of death's imminence, as well as its mendacious finality, in a style that does nothing to soften their impact. Returned from the grave, Lily's body is full of gaseous decay and corrupt odours, 'her skin pale as tallow, her eyes gold as chicken fat . . . she seemed a sweet and putrid gouache'. There is supposedly a nobility in being able to face death, be it ever so torturously slow or obscenely sudden, the intuition that prompts mourners to write something lovely in the remembrance book or on Facebook, an instinct children must begin to learn when the labrador dies. Max and Finn's mother had it on her deathbed: 'paralyzed by tumor-induced stroke, [she] looked beautiful and brave and gave Finn a wink that let him know she was in on everything.' Death is a big event for Moore's people, but what encloses it is too small to contain it, so that it spills out clumsily and makes a mess. Getting it wrong is the last word in tastelessness. 'The whole Enterprise of Life was snooty and didn't really want that much to do with death. Death made Life look bad.’
Lily's two suicide attempts, undertaken by the same method in an institution where every means of self-harm has been prudently removed from her, test physiological credulity, but death after all, like truth, will out. When she makes a nocturnal return from a state of limbo that appears to have survived its Protestant abolition, she and Finn undertake an epic road trip, in which there is time to dissect the dysfunctionality and wreck of their relationship, her turning to another man, her work as a clown-costumed bereavement counsellor, the whole tacky dialectic of comedy and tragedy, the abraded line between wanting to live and not wanting to want to. Along the way, they stop at a scuzzy motel, where Finn happens on a bound collection of handwritten letters from the 1870s, in which a woman who signs herself 'Eliz' wrote reflective, revealing missives to her sister, but apparently never mailed them. These are dropped in at regular intervals among the scenes between Finn and Max, and between Finn and Lily. The letters too are full of deaths, not least the recent assassination of President Lincoln. Eliz runs a rooming-house, in which one of the residents, Jack, a well-spoken theatrical type who wears a velvet cape, appears to have his eye on her. The twin themes of hopeless desire and death wind through her narratives too, but her phlegmatic approach to both stands in stark tonal contrast to Finn's fumbling inarticulacies.
The present-day narrative actually takes place in the fall of 2016, on the eve and after the fact of America's most calamitous modern presidential election. It is a world that was already way out of whack before Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Its madness is especially lurid in the educational context, it seems to Finn; linguistic safe spaces have been created to acknowledge all varieties of cultural sensitivity, because schools themselves are anything but safe, as one mass shooter after another reminds us. He wonders whether there may be some mileage in teaching a history course based on the actual conspiracies that lie behind the one-damn-thing-after-another of history. There is nothing like a hard-edged conspiracy for scything through the gossamer tangles of mere conspiracy theories.
Lorrie Moore's imagistic writing achieves a dexterous balance of the poetics of yesteryear with the internalised technologies of the modern world, producing lightweight load-bearing sentences that might be missed by the plot-conscious reader. How to show a flurry of birds? 'Grackles ascended in a scatter with their weird groupthink, swirling.' The night sky? 'The dippers, the gods, the warriors all flickering about the ambiguous emoji of the moon.' The messy foliage of trees seen from a moving car? 'Out the window the bedheads of the keening, windblown trees waved their branches in screeching, stretching yawns.' It is a pliant, capacious language that makes no distinctions between solemnity and levity, which mutually inform each other all the way to the closing funeral at which Finn delivers an oration. 'He looked out at the congregation and saw some worried faces. He knew then that he sounded insane to absolutely everyone.' If the disjointed relation to social reality, viewed with a fatalistic irony, is a familiar theme in contemporary American fiction, from Deborah Eisenberg to Callan Wink, Moore is one of its virtuoso performers.
Some critics have felt that her longer fiction lacks narrative integrity, that she sets up a promising scenario and then lets it get out of hand through over-complication. Nicole Lamy in the Harvard Review wrote of A Gate at the Stairs that '[t]ragedies mount like a pileup on the interstate .. .Each strand could have been its own short story, but together they fail to connect. Readers are left with a kind of Big Issues soup.' . There is an improvisational quality to I Am Homeless, but this novel essentially consists of two dramatic scenes played out in dialogue rather than action. The development takes place at the level of how characters' attitudes to their predicaments, including the remorseless demise of their loved ones, play out. There may not even be any great revelation, only another angle on the same immovable reality, perhaps one that, in Finn's case, involves imaginatively moving it out of its reality and into a realm where a converse with the dead may take place, the chance not to say everything that was left unsaid, but to discover that it really couldn't have been said in any conclusive or consoling way after all. What matters is the change of angle. 'I am not homeless,’ reads the notice by the mendicant's money-jar on the subway. 'This is my home.’
Despite all the mortality, Moore is still a skilled comedian. Finn's landlady has asked him to find a new toilet for his apartment, a scene that involves him sitting on one lowered seat after another in a toilet showroom, at the unsettling behest of a salesman, 'like taking crap after crap right there in the store'. Suffering an auto breakdown in the middle of the night, he thanks the car mechanic who gets the engine going again in what seems the only appropriate manly way, by kissing and hugging him. 'A beautiful man. A man beautiful to behold. Finn wanted to marry him. He never wanted to be without him.' The misjudgement of tone, the awkward moment that fails to resolve, the minor misunderstanding that lasts a lifetime, the faintly crazed funeral tribute: these are the stock-in-trade of Moore's principal characters. In the midst of death, they are in life, which suffers by the comparison. But just as fatuous indignity looks to be as ineluctable as mortality, they find moments of unmediated emotional truth, in clichés and song-lyrics. spikes of cynical wisdom and sudden cries of angry pain. 'I want you in the world, where you belong,' a desperate Finn tells the departing Lily's ghost. She thinks the world where she belongs may well be the one where she is now going, and his anger can't reel her back. 'Baby,' she tells him, you've lost that lovin' feeling.' Soon after, she bids him a last farewell, holding out the hope of an occasional return in the manner of Emily Brontë's Cathy, via Aretha Franklin:
One final time she spun slowly, to add, with her red nose still on and her finger in the air, 'Gonna rap on your door.'
'What?'
'Tap on your –'
'You have the meaning of that song backward!' he called exegetically out to her.
If it is all too easy to imagine that the dead would rather not come back again, especially where, like Lily, they have chosen their own exits, Finn's comfortless tears, his sense of his own inadequacy delivering his brother's eulogy, remind him that nothing is ever truly over. This could be a source of solace, in that the departed live on in our hearts, but it is also the caustic reminder that that isn't enough.