=Books recently read=

Birds of America [stories] by Lorrie Moore.  A minor actress on the downside of a career that never-quite-was retreats into self-exile and a brief, desperate affair with an auto mechanic. An adventurous mother and her timid adult daughter travel together to Ireland and discover they have more in common than they thought. A librarian gets involved with a "community-minded" man and feels lonelier than she felt when she was actually alone. 

This book gathers together twelve stories that Moore wrote when she was first truly hitting her prime. They deal mainly with white, middle-class, middle-aged women, the kind of characters with the kind of concerns you'd expect in stories written by the kind of authors who write for The New Yorker. I used to turn my back in rebellious disgust at such stories and such writing—too lacking in outsider existential angst for me. I'm not the only one either. To many, Moore comes off as a bit too smart, too smug, and too smarmy for her own good. Who cares about her primarily sheltered, privileged characters? But times have changed and so have I. Now I can appreciate the "small" moments that Moore writes about much better than before and I can see how much larger catastrophes in real life turn on such seeming insignificancies. But whatever you think of the size and depth of her vision, one thing is undeniable: Moore can write.

(Lorrie Moore)

To her credit, in this collection, Moore does seem to be consciously stretching her previous limits. For instance, there's a story about a divorced, straight, house-painter who ends up in a sexual relationship with a blind flamingly gay lawyer. How's that for moving out of one's comfort zone? There's also a story about a woman dying of cancer; another story about a woman who's baby is dying of cancer; and a story about a woman who (albeit accidentally) actually kills a baby.

But most of the stories are still within Moore's traditional wheelhouse. A woman mourns the death of her cat. Another woman returns home on the holidays where she plays a telling game of charades with her family. A disaffected wife—what wife in a Moore story isn't disaffected?—develops a crush on a celebrated writer who has come to read at her adult education class.

Most of the women in these stories are writers or teachers or someone who has something to do with words.  They are bright, articulate, acidic in their observations and conversations. Most of their marriages are failed or failing. People are together, but basically alone. They're trying hard but life, alas, is always just that much harder.

These stories are smart, sophisticated, and polished and that is precisely what I once found so objectionable. They are evidence of a writer in complete control, the handiwork of a master craftswoman. They are disciplined to within an inch of their life; they seem to lack the wildness, the rawness, and the passion of one crying in the wilderness for whom language isn't quite enough. Language seems quite adequate to describe what Moore has to say and she utilizes it with a pitch-perfect eloquence that is often breathtaking and occasionally heartbreaking. Ironically, I think it's Moore's virtuoso command that leaves some readers feeling cold and unsatisfied. Maybe. I suppose I can convince myself that I feel this way, too; but I can't talk myself out of the admiration and awe I have for her as a writer and for the majority of the work in this collection.