Like many of her contemporaries, Lorrie Moore likes to play with the space between what words say and what they mean. The short stories in Self-Help (1985), many written in the imperative, ostensibly tell the reader “how to be an other woman” or “how to become a writer” or “go like this”—but the book’s title betrays its true audience. Moore tinkers with the forms of fiction, too: Anagrams (1986) features several stories in which the same characters, names, plot points, and details get rearranged into different configurations; the stories in Birds of America (1998) ape the Audubon guide by the same title. (She has also written a 1994 novella, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, and a 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, but the short story is where her talent shines.)
All of these collections contain formally or thematically linked stories that let the reader see a theme from different angles and grasp its complexity. One of her more pronounced stylistic tics takes this prismatic approach down to the micro-level: Moore is obsessed with puns and wordplay, exploiting the multiple meanings of a single word to create a joke, expose a truth, or both. Her characters (frequently plain, single women who wish they were neither) are forever punning for a darkly comic effect, often in order to hide their hurt behind an affected lighthearted irony. In “How to Be an Other Woman,” the narrator tells her reader to address her lover thusly: “Say: ‘I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.’ “
The epigraph of Moore’s new collection, Bark, makes it clear that the title is itself a pun: bark, like what a dog says, and bark, like what envelops a tree. In the epigraph, Moore quotes Louise Gluck’s Vita Nova: “In the splitting up dream / we were fighting over who would keep / the dog … be a brave dog—this is / all material; you’ll wake up / in a different world, / you will eat again, you will grow up into a poet! / Life is very weird, no matter how it ends, / very filled with dreams.”
A barking dog is trying to get the attention of its humans or other dogs; it barks in fear, or alarm, or warning, or excitement. Barking is an attempt to communicate, however clumsy—but too much barking will get you slapped with a noise ordinance.
Bark also is the tough skin that develops to protect the more vulnerable inner core of a tree from predators, insects, fungi, and viruses. And while some trees can grow new bark when wounded, leaving only a scar, other trees simply can’t. Sometimes, if a strong wire or rope is tied around a tree’s middle when it is young, it simply incorporates the constraint into its body, making it nearly impossible to extract.
These meanings merge in Bark, in stories exploring the difficult aftermath (or just-before-math) of relationships that are going down the tubes. A breakup, scientists have noted, is a lot like actually losing a part of one’s brain, since we “deposit” our personal histories and memories into another person. The protagonists deal with the stripping away of their bark by scabbing over (like a tree) or making noise (like a dog). This wordplay structures the eight stories, which mark a new stage in Moore’s work—while the characters in her earlier stories often start with high hopes and encounter disappointment in the form of the “real world,” these characters have already met with disappointment, and are trying to decide how to go on.
The first story, “Debarking,” centers on Ira, a mildly observant Jew, recently divorced. In treelike fashion, Ira can’t get his wedding ring off because “[h]is finger had swelled doughily around it—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition, he said to friends.” His flesh has acted like scar tissue, keeping the wound of the ring bound to his finger and keeping him in the hold of a relationship that will never be restored. And by the end of the story, disappointed yet again by an odd affair with a woman who is too attached to her teenage son to leave him alone for things like romantic dates, Ira is perched on a barstool in the local dive, still with his ring jammed on, barking out his bitter sense of futility:
Happy Easter … The dead shall rise! The dead are risen! The damages will be mitigated! The Messiah is back among us squeezing the flesh—that nap went by quickly, eh? May all the dead arise! No one has really been killed at all—OK, God looked away for a second to watch some I Love Lucy reruns, but he is back now. Nothing has been lost. All is restored. He is watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps!
“Somebody slap that guy,” mutters a man at the end of the bar, and the story ends. Rings make another appearance in “Paper Losses,” in which Kit and Rafe are splitting up after years of marriage. Kit notes that Rafe—unlike Ira—”had removed his ring … a year earlier because he said it ‘bothered’ him. She had thought at the time he’d meant it was rubbing.”
The most haunting story in the collection is also one of the longest—”Wings,” in which the protagonist, KC (whose tellingly abbreviated name does not even appear until the fourth page of the story), is so wrapped up in enabling her haplessly unemployed boy-friend Dench’s existence that she’s lost herself entirely, and she knows it: “She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his, which was worse.”
KC’s extraction comes slowly and painfully. She meets an old man living near the house she and Dench are renting and becomes involved in his life, which leads to her own freedom. But as she ages, alone, she remembers that she’d ignored a vital fact about Dench at the very beginning of their relationship—doomed before they started, because she’d neglected, in a sense, to bark.
You’d hardly call these stories comical, though they have moments of Moore’s signature dark humor. Nor are they optimistic about the possibilities of restoring the bark once the wound has been made. But there’s a hint of hope. The book ends with “Thank You for Having Me,” in which the narrator, a single mother of a teenage daughter, is a guest at a wedding of young people (the bride already on her second husband, the first serving as the pianist). A gang of bikers shows up to halt the wedding—only to realize they’ve got the wrong ceremony.
Watching the reception get underway after the interlopers leave—and sensing an impending rainstorm—the narrator reflects on the day: “The biker was right: you had to unfreeze your feet, take blind steps backward, risk a loss of balance, risk an endless fall, in order to give life room.” She crosses the lawn to grab the (also single) father of the pianist, startling him. She whirls him around. He raises a hand in a dance gesture.
“I needed my breath for dancing,” she says, “so I tried not to laugh. I fixed my face into a grin instead, and, ah, then for a second sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn.”
Alissa Wilkinson is assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College, chief film critic at Christianity Today, and editor of Q Ideas.
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