Review by New York Times Review
"BARK" IS THE first collection of stories in 16 years by Lorrie Moore, and I'll admit that when I first saw its modest size and table of contents - eight stories? one every two years? - I felt let down. I would have traded her moving but relatively conventional 2009 novel, "A Gate at the Stairs," for a horse-choking stack of 15 long, dense stories, each with the specific gravity (and the desperate levity) of "People Like That Are the Only People Here," the astonishing centerpiece of her previous collection, "Birds of America." But I was wrong! (Moore is one of the all-time great deployers of the exclamation point, that cheap and skinny punctuational powerhouse - she's also a great deployer of the epithet - so I thought I'd try one and see how it felt. Felt transgressive!) The uncrowded format of "Bark" allows each story the chance it deserves for leisurely examination and appreciation, like the kind of museum retrospective you never get to see anymore. It's just enough: No admirer of Moore's will go away either overloaded or unsatisfied, and it lets us contemplate and savor just what makes her work unique. Let's start with that title. The three epigraphs (from the poets Louise Glück, Caroline Squire and Amy Gerstler) point toward both the canine and arboreal senses of the word - a monitory utterance, a protective shell - and those senses keep bobbing up from story to story. KC, the protagonist of "Wings," refers to marijuana as "sparky bark" and tells an old man her dog's bark is worse than his bite (to which the man replies, sensibly, "A bite is always worse"). The narrator of another story tells her daughter about a PBS show "that said only the outer bark of the brain - and it does look like bark - is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity." (We'll return to the subject of "connectivity" below.) And the title of the first story, "Debarking," suggests yet another meaning: It's about a man disembarking from a bad marriage, and being stripped of the habits and attitudes that had protected him. (Oh, and his ex-wife accuses him of barking at people, and his new girlfriend's son has a barking voice.) Here's the thing, though. Ringing such changes on the word "bark" may be clever, but does it really mean anything? Or is it basically a dumb, punning joke, like the one about the talking dog who, when asked what's on top of a house, goes "Roof!" I'd say the latter - and I'd also say Moore knows it. She's a bit like the protagonist of "Debarking," who "loved rhymes. Fum! Thumb! Dumb! They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap." Such wordplay (if we can call it play) isn't merely amusing or decorative, but crucial to her sensibility. PROBABLY NO WRITER since Nabokov has been as language-obsessed as Moore, but while Nabokov saw himself as an enchanter, a Prospero of words reveling in his power, Moore is a darker spirit, skeptical of language even as she makes it do tricks. "Mutilation was a language," one character reflects when she sees her son's cutting scars. "And vice versa." She's the most Beckettian of Nabokovians. Her characters banter and wisecrack their way through their largely mirthless lives in screwball-comedy style, but for them it's a compulsive tic whose aim is sometimes self-protection (utterance that warns others off and forms a protective shell) and sometimes just to fill the void; the point is its pointlessness. "She had given up trying to determine his facetiousness level," KC says of Dench, her relentlessly witty boyfriend. "She suspected it was all just habit and his true intent was unknown even to himself." KC and Dench are the sort of people who note that a dried-out spider plant looks like "Bob Marley on chemo," and that uterine cancer is "the silent killer. Especially in men." Moore didn't invent the breed - Beckett, among others, got there before her - but she may be the chief contemporary chronicler of those whose dread makes them unable to turn off the laugh machine. If Nabokov is Prospero, Moore is Mickey Mouse as the panicked sorcerer's apprentice, drowning in metastasizing verbal enchantments. It's a commonplace to call Moore's work "funny," but that's not quite right. P. G. Wodehouse is funny. Moore is an anatomist of funny. ("If you're suicidal," one character says, "and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.'") Not that we don't laugh - surely more than her characters do. But nothing in her work is really comic. Her gags are like her exclamation points, which always denote a willed, rather than a felt, excitement: Both have air quotes around them. Several of the stories in "Bark" may surprise Moore's longtime readers. "Foes" involves a self-declared "evil lobbyist," a right-wing birther who's been grievously scarred in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon; in "Subject to Search," an intelligence officer breaks the news about Abu Ghraib to the woman he's involved with. More successful than this once-timely work is "The Juniper Tree," a tale of friendship, betrayal, guilt and sorrow disguised as a most convincing ghost story. But about half are what we've come to think of as classic Lorrie Moore stories, in the vein of "You're Ugly, Too" or "The Jewish Hunter" (from "Like Life") and "Willing" or "Terrific Mother" (from "Birds of America"): quasi-realistic accounts of heterosexual love troubles, with irruptions of the dire and the grotesque. Ira, the protagonist of "Debarking," is so sexually compelled by his girlfriend that he wills himself to consider her a "gentle, lovely woman"; in fact, she's a maniacal mechanical bride, who at one point puts an umbrella to her crotch, presses the button and sends it "rocketing out, unfurled, like a cartoon erection," and has a sexualized, physically aggressive attachment to her teenage son. In "Wings," an emotionally disconnected couple trace the smell in their rented house to a "rat king": a cluster of dead rats tangled together with their own tails. We don't need to disentangle that symbolism - which returns us, as promised, to the subject of connectivity. Like the sparky bark of joyless japery, this is a distinguishing feature of Moore's work: the relentless likening of X to Y, by means of analogy, metaphor or simile. (The title of her second collection, "Like Life," would fit any and all of them.) Her analogical imagination is sometimes visual - who but Moore would have the chutzpah to compare the Abu Ghraib photographs to the human pileups of the Pilobolus dance company? - and sometimes purely verbal whimsy. "The walls, like love, were trompe l'oeil. ... The menu, like love, was full of delicate, gruesome things. ... The candle, like love, flickered." At other times a conventional verbal simile ("like riding a bike") will morph, by a series of associations, into a whole imaginary visual scene, much like the realistic deathbed moment that begins Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and turns out to be nothing but an analogy to the parting of lovers. "If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead," the narrator reflects in "Thank You for Having Me," "why 'learn to be alone' in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike." SUCH ANALOGIES AND similes, which must average out to at least one per page, interpose layer after layer of remoteness from the real - a "banana-flavored" custard "doesn't taste like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like" - and they suggest a frantic impulse to connect anything with anything. They're not meant to assert a hidden unity in the world: They're backward assertions that there is no such unity, oblique denials that anything really is like anything else, that there really is such a thing as meaningful connectivity. Certainly Moore's characters' lives are studies in disconnection. Their marriages and relationships fall apart, their loved ones die; aloneness is the cream in their coffee, the salt in their stew. "On the ride home, she and Pete did not exchange a word, and every time she looked at his aging hands . . . she would understand anew the desperate place they both were in, though the desperations were separate, not joined." Is there any meaningful likeness between the doomed romance in the foreground of "Debarking" and the 2003 bombing of Iraq that serves as its backdrop? I doubt Moore thinks so: these are separate desperations, and yoking them together by violence (as Samuel Johnson said Donne and the other metaphysical poets did with their "heterogeneous ideas") creates a parody of unity and coherence, a sense of dread both aesthetically satisfying and deeply scary. If I've made "Bark" sound like no fun at all, all I really mean is that it does its dreading in style. In the world according to Moore - the "planet of the apings," as one character thinks of it - who could ask for more? 'If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as "wry."' DAVID GATES'S most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible World," a collection of stories.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 23, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Moore's first collection of short stories, the uncommonly perceptive and energetically articulate Birds of America (1998), established her prominent place in the renaissance of the American short story that made itself heard with great innovation in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, she has alternated between story collections and novels, and now a new compilation of stories will add support to the widely held opinion that the short form is her true forte. Her talent is best exhibited in the collection's longest stories (each around 40 pages); her comfort with that length is indicated by her careful avoidance of overplotting, which, of course, dulls the effect of an expansive short story, and by not allowing the stories to seem like the outlines of novels that never got developed. These two examples of her proficiency shine: Debarking is about a divorced man who enters the dating scene only to experience complications with the is-she-crazy woman he starts dating and also within himself, as intimacy seems the natural antidote to global craziness ; Wings concerns husband-and-wife musicians whose dreams haven't panned out. A major ingredient of Moore's tales of troubled lives is an abiding humor, which serves to protect her characters, in all their frailties, from grating on the reader as too pathetic. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An extensive author tour will attract many Moore enthusiasts and generate both publicity and sales.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
There are eight stories in Moore's latest collection, and, like her previous work (Birds of America), these stories are laugh-out-loud funny, as well as full of pithy commentary on contemporary life and politics. In much of Moore's earlier fiction, the protagonists are young girls or mothers of small children. Here, they are all divorcees. They have teenagers. They've variously tried and failed at dating, holding down jobs, being kind, or being sane. Perhaps that accounts for the ever-present sting of sadness in the book: relationships don't fare well (with one slightly desperate exception), and the sly wisdom of Moore's meditations on time will get under your skin like a splinter. "Referential," a wry updating of Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols," is a fascinating look at what happens when the mind of one writer collides with the mind of another. In the final story, "Thank You For Having Me," the narrator stops her teenager daughter's onslaught of scorn by undressing, mortifying her into silence. Moore's final note is one of hope and even love-not the romantic kind, but the kind that sees the whole world, flaws and all, and embraces it anyway. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this slim volume of stories, obliquely titled Bark (referencing the protective covering of a tree, what a dog says, or a boat on which one "embarks"-all seem to apply), Moore once again brings her acute intelligence and wit to play. These sharply observed stories are filled with characters whose sense of irony keeps them at an uncomfortable emotional distance from one another and from the world they inhabit. In one story, a recently divorced father out on a date notices the walls in the restaurant, "like love, were trompe l'oeil.painted like viewful windows though only a fool wouldn't know they were walls." Also like love is the menu, "full of delicate, gruesome things-cheeks, tongues, thymus glands." Clearly, this nascent romance is likewise filled with menace, but the language around it has a fizzy rhythm that will have the reader turning the pages. VERDICT Smart, funny, and overlaid with surprising metaphor, these stories depict absurd situations that are at the same time strikingly familiar. There are no happy endings, but we cannot help laughing. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/13.]-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One of the best short story writers in America resumes her remarkable balancing act with a collection that is both hilarious and heartbreaking, sometimes in the same paragraph. With the announced retirement and Nobel coronation of Alice Munro, Moore (Birds of America, 1998, etc.) seems peerless in her command of tone and her virtuosity in writing stories that could never be mistaken for anyone else's. There's nothing particularly "difficult" about her fiction--except for the incisive reflections of the difficulties, complexities and absurdities of life--nothing academic or postmodern in her approach (except perhaps for the deus ex machina motorcycle gang that inadvertently crashes the unusual wedding in the astonishing closing story, "Thank You for Having Me"). And there is no title story, though the two longest (and two of the best) stories suggest the dual reference of the word "bark," to a tree or a dog. In the opening "Debarking," a man in the aftermath of a painful divorce becomes involved with an attractive woman who is plainly crazy--and perhaps the craziness is part of the attraction? "Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane," he ruminates. "Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people." He is a man with a protective bark, and one whose ex-wife accused him of "being hard on people--You bark at them.' " In "Wings," a singer involved with a musician who may be crazy, or just deceitful or manipulative, befriends an older man, who responds to the adage "his bark is worse than his bite" with: "I don't know why people always say that. No bark is worse than a bite. A bite is always worse." Every one of these stories has a flesh-tearing bite to it, though all but one ("Referential") are also fiendishly funny. In stories both dark and wry, Moore wields a scalpel with surgical precision.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
