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A review by rbreade
Bark by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is at it again in these eight short stories, brilliantly deploying the exclamation mark--what other writer has so utterly colonized a punctuation mark in her name?--lavishing fresh dialogue and description across every page, sharp observations by the ton, and mixing wry, gentle humor into even the saddest of situations.
Examples, of course. In "Thank You for Having Me," the bridesmaids at a wedding "were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn't I thought of that?" Not only is this fresh and funny, it characterizes the first-person narrator so much better than other approaches, such as, perhaps, the narrator ruminating on the pills she's taken, or continues to take, for a variety of troubles, unconnected to anything going on in the story at hand.
Tiny details of description? Moore doesn't skimp on them. In "Debarking," a refrigerator "puckered open, then whooshed shut." Puckered. Exactly.
Later in the same story, the narrator muses on dating after divorce, well into middle-age: "It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings!--graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was."
Note one of her trademark exclamation marks as she quickly and vividly sketches a complex emotional undertaking in only a few sentences.
Well, more of this is available on each and every page.
Examples, of course. In "Thank You for Having Me," the bridesmaids at a wedding "were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn't I thought of that?" Not only is this fresh and funny, it characterizes the first-person narrator so much better than other approaches, such as, perhaps, the narrator ruminating on the pills she's taken, or continues to take, for a variety of troubles, unconnected to anything going on in the story at hand.
Tiny details of description? Moore doesn't skimp on them. In "Debarking," a refrigerator "puckered open, then whooshed shut." Puckered. Exactly.
Later in the same story, the narrator muses on dating after divorce, well into middle-age: "It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings!--graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was."
Note one of her trademark exclamation marks as she quickly and vividly sketches a complex emotional undertaking in only a few sentences.
Well, more of this is available on each and every page.