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A review by gemmak
Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
3.0
"At last it had been confirmed: My life was really as difficult as I had always suspected."
This quote follows Benna's, the book's most of the time narrator, discovery of a lump in her breast, but it serves as a fitting epigram for the book as a whole. The concept of this novel is that Benna and Gerard love each other sometimes, and sometimes they don't, but they are not always the same people. Lorrie Moore makes anagrams of their lives and relationships to each other in a series of chapters set in alternate realities. In one, they live across the hall from each other. Gerard loves Benna, and Benna loves no one. In another, they live in a house together but Gerard is moving across the country and leaving Benna behind. In the last, longest section of the book, Benna teaches at a community college and Gerard is her only friend. Each section analyses the difficulty of relating to someone when you want their love, and makes slow-burning loneliness something interesting to read about. It's only that the external world, the impossibility of knowing for sure that someone else loves you, has the sense of entitled drama about it.
Moore's writing is skillful and funny, like when she describes a class of students as "twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones". She's pleasant to read, but I'm left wanting something more. Yes, love is difficult, and it's hard to find yourself alone, but I have to believe that there are more feelings in the world than love and the lack of it. Perhaps if I were a different person I would give this book four stars. Perhaps if I were nineteen again I would give it five. But me, now, can only give three because love is good, but it is not enough. All of prose is about love, and it has to be damn clever to look up above the rest. This is good, but it's not a mountain. It's only another tree in the forest at its side.
This quote follows Benna's, the book's most of the time narrator, discovery of a lump in her breast, but it serves as a fitting epigram for the book as a whole. The concept of this novel is that Benna and Gerard love each other sometimes, and sometimes they don't, but they are not always the same people. Lorrie Moore makes anagrams of their lives and relationships to each other in a series of chapters set in alternate realities. In one, they live across the hall from each other. Gerard loves Benna, and Benna loves no one. In another, they live in a house together but Gerard is moving across the country and leaving Benna behind. In the last, longest section of the book, Benna teaches at a community college and Gerard is her only friend. Each section analyses the difficulty of relating to someone when you want their love, and makes slow-burning loneliness something interesting to read about. It's only that the external world, the impossibility of knowing for sure that someone else loves you, has the sense of entitled drama about it.
Moore's writing is skillful and funny, like when she describes a class of students as "twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones". She's pleasant to read, but I'm left wanting something more. Yes, love is difficult, and it's hard to find yourself alone, but I have to believe that there are more feelings in the world than love and the lack of it. Perhaps if I were a different person I would give this book four stars. Perhaps if I were nineteen again I would give it five. But me, now, can only give three because love is good, but it is not enough. All of prose is about love, and it has to be damn clever to look up above the rest. This is good, but it's not a mountain. It's only another tree in the forest at its side.