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MADISON, Wis.
— You have to be willing to have only a few friends,
Lorrie Moore
said.
Writers,
if they are honest with themselves, cannot worry about
offending or how many allies they have acquired in this
world. It's an obnoxious position, hard to defend. But
they do not work for the
Chamber of Commerce
; they are not examples to the community. They are there
for their story, and if it sounds harsh ...
Well,
maybe.
She said
this nicely.
We got on
the subject because I mentioned she is one of those
writers from whom readers take cues on how to live, and
how not to.
"I
hope not," she said.
Then she
considered the point a moment — a point that
John Cheever
and
Raymond Carver
and
Alice Munro
and the other short story masters she is routinely
lumped in with have all heard — and she said, somewhat
coyly, "I always thought people read for
company."
Perhaps,
but for 25 years, Moore has been the kind of writer who
"brings that eerie quality to a story that suggests
someone has eavesdropped on your thoughts," New
Yorker fiction editor
Deborah Treisman
told me. "And that's because Lorrie gets to the
heart of how people talk right now, how they fumble
words, and blame, and miscommunicate. She captures the
social tics that spill across speech. No one has
captured that — or how we live now — as well. I
can't see Lorrie writing historical novels."
That
said, hers is not a brand of incisiveness without hurt
or disgust, and Moore, who emerged with a new
best-seller, a novel ("A Gate at the Stairs"),
a few months ago after a 10-year absence, and who
started the year by eulogizing
John Updike
(who, conversely, included Moore's "You're Ugly,
Too" in the "Best American Short Stories of
the Century"), and who is ending the year on scores
of best-of-2009 lists, still comes off as funny as she
is abrasive.
Her
subjects remain everyday — relationships, family. But
her talent for showcasing everyday absurdities and pangs
of regret, and the way people habitually joke instead of
discuss, is less common. The
Illinois
history professor in "You're Ugly, Too," for
instance, visiting friends in
New York
, becomes so bored with a guy who corners her on the
balcony at a
Halloween
party that, for a moment, she begins to push him over
the balcony — only to apologize.
Indeed,
near the end of "A Gate at the Stairs,"
Moore's 20-year-old protagonist, who becomes nanny to a
semi-precious bohemian
Wisconsin
couple, decides that when talking with people about
impossible subjects, "to ease the suffering of the
listener, things had better be funny."
"I
always took her to be an incredibly compassionate
writer," said former
Chicago
theater director
Abigail Deser
, who staged a series of readings based on Moore's
stories at the
Museum of Contemporary Art
in 2004.
"But
if her work gets under your skin, I suppose it's because
people think saying good things about others is the same
as compassion, and she knows the difference."
Moore and
I sat in an upscale neighborhood bistro — "great
moules frites," she says. It's the kind of
restaurant that didn't exist in
Madison
when she moved here, about the time
"Self-Help" (1985), her first collection, was
published. The titles of her stories then, many written
while she was in graduate school at
Cornell University
, "How To Be an Other Woman," "How to
Talk to Your Mother," "How to Become a
Writer" ("First, try to do something,
anything, else"), were often deeply ironic parodies
of the notion that good fiction should be cathartic and
instructive.
Nevertheless,
I raised, for a second time, the idea that her work was
perversely instructive. She said she didn't really
believe in "work that gives instruction, which
would be silly. If a work is complex, there should be 10
contradictory morals, and any lessons won't be
recognizable. Neither will the pieces pulled from life.
You tell people they are not in a work because they
aren't, if you're doing your job."
She
teaches creative writing at the
University of Wisconsin
— she's been in the English Department since she was
27, when she was the youngest member of the department
in its history.
That was
25 years ago, when she moved to
Madison
from upstate
New York
. Anyway, her students, she says, "they don't feel
the transgressive nature of literature yet. Especially
undergrads. They worry about offending people, and
that's fine. They don't want to upset people. They show
their writing to their parents. To their parents! I say,
'OK, Becky, now write something you wouldn't show your
parents.' Becky says, 'I couldn't!' But, see — they're
nice kids."
Moore
slaps the bistro table lightly and takes a sip from her
Belgian wheat ale.
Moore is
52 now.
She
decided this would be the last stop on her book tour,
meaning the last stop would take place in private, a
block or so from her home, which was built 100 years ago
and is tall and yellow and, on the day I arrive,
bordered with a brown moat of thick dead leaves. She
didn't want anyone in her home, she said apologetically.
She just doesn't like journalists to see the flotsam of
her life. Besides, her son had the swine flu. But also,
I suspect, it's convenient for Moore, who's never been
much on soliciting attention. She is not unfriendly,
and, yes, she still has friends, despite three decades
of short stories and novels that keenly see through the
pretensions of high-minded college-town types and
discombobulated urban dwellers. (The title of one of her
best stories, "People Like That Are the Only People
Here," could be the title of half of her stories.)
During a long conversation, she is not at all guarded
about her personal life in
Madison
— nuggets of information slip out, a divorce years
ago, her teenage son's health issues.
But for
someone who knows a certain tasteful, upper
middle-class, vaguely trendy, socially conscious,
politically lazy category of American intimately —
speaking to one of her editors, I kept referring to
Madison
as
Evanston
, until we decided the distinction was minor — Moore
herself has retained a modest profile.
"I'm
not deliberately hiding up here," she replied.
"But
I am a single mom, and my kid has swine flu, and I just
came back from
Denver
, and I don't have the strength to write all the time,
and I want that person to be separate from the work. I'm
not a confessional person. My life is not very
interesting anyway. I don't do anything."
She says
this, partly, to explain why it took a decade to turn in
the follow-up to "Birds of America," her
acclaimed 1998 collection.
"The
feeling that the world is getting away from you is not a
good feeling for a writer," she said. She hears
this from writer friends. She also said another reason
it takes her longer now perhaps is that her writing is
changing, partly because her relationship with
Madison
changed.
"Lorrie
was complete when we first published her, the total
package," said
Victoria Wilson
, who has edited each of Moore's books at Knopf.
"But she is growing, less minimalist, more
heartfelt and sophisticated, than she was in the 1980s.
Her voice is still there, but there's less stylishness
now."
Recently,
a collection of her complete stories was published in
England
.
Which
meant Moore had to read everything she's ever written.
"It was a nightmare. As you read, you think it's
pretty good, then you hit something so awful, you wonder
if you knew the difference between good and bad writing.
I guess I didn't. All I could think was how I would
never write those stories now. Not at all.
"I
don't feel like a stranger in a strange land, like I did
when I first moved to the Midwest.
Madison
was cheap then. You couldn't find Thai food, or even a
good bagel. Those were things I resented. But there's a
sameness that's sweeping the country. The Midwest is
losing whatever made it so foreign. The South — same
thing. I wrote a lot from that dislocation. Someone's
visiting, and there's disruption. It's a classic story
construction, and maybe there's just less of a reason
for it now."
———
Christopher Borrelli
: cborrelli@tribune.com
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