Kasia Boddy
BIRDS OF AMERICA by Lorrie Moore (Faber &Faber)
Like the birds they observe living “punishing, unblessed lives, winging it north, south, here, there”, Lorrie Moore’s characters are constantly searching “for a place of rest”. In one story a mother and daughter tour Ireland, searching for both “the past of America” and their lost innocence, while in another, two men, embarking upon an uneasy love affair, travel around the southern states and always seem to end up in cemeteries.
Birds of America, literal and metaphorical, flit through most of the 12 stories in this, Moore’s third collection. “I’m trying to get all my birds to land in the same yard,” says one character, but this is usually a vain ambition. The landings that are achieved generally turn out to be unwelcome or at best precarious.
Predatory crows shriek in the backyard of Aileen, who can’t come to terms with the death of her cat, and also of Ruth, whose restlessness has “come falsely to rest”. Only in the final story, Terrific Mother, do birds augur well. Adrienne, grazed by a cockatiel as she leaves her masseuse, begins to feel a bit better about her life.
In the title story of Moore’s previous collection, Like Life, a woman is told that she has pre-cancerous cells in her throat. “Pre-cancer,” she says – “Isn’t that … like life?” Illness and death (in particular cancer) have always hovered at the edges of Moore’s stories, but never perhaps as painfully as in the penultimate story here, in which a mother comes to terms with her baby’s cancer. The story turns into a meditation on linear narrative (“A beginning, an end: there seems to be neither”) and the power of wit and the imagination to console.
Wit has always been the first weapon that Moore’s characters reach for in their defence against pain, and they are experts at bad puns and slips of sound and sense. “Goodbye” becomes “could cry”, “paediatric oncology” is easier as “Peed Onk”.
Chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 1996, and the author of two novels, Anagrams (1986) and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), it is the short story where Moore excels – partly because her self-conscious playfulness is at its best in small, mordant doses, but also because it suits her sense of life’s fragile contingency and her scepticism about large and lasting truths. “`Get a Job,’ she shouted silently to God. `Get a real Job.'”