Birds of America: Stories
By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf
1998 (first edition)
Condition: Some wear on book jacket including evidence of water damage; annotated text; owner’s name inscribed.
Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional, personal [*]
I reviewed Moore’s collection “Birds of America” in October 1998. The piece ran in The Capital Times, and it was my first review for the paper. I had previously written a profile about poet (and fiction writer) Tenaya Darlington (who later became a very good friend), but the Moore review was my first run as a real reviewer.
I’ve always suspected that my editor, John Nichols, chose me because I was utterly unknown in local literary circles, and when he asked me to do the review, I didn’t immediately start giggling like a small child over the honor of writing about one of America’s most revered short story writers (”Self Help”). I was excited to write the review, yes, but I wasn’t star-struck. I believe that suited Nichol’s purposes perfectly.
He reminded me with an appropriate amount of gravity that Moore, who serves as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-present), had a strong local following, a move that injected just the right amount of tension into my consideration of the book. I was stepping into some big shoes with the review, and I knew Nichols wouldn’t accept any opinions that didn’t have the hallmarks of careful, incisive thought. I wanted to please Nichols, and I wanted to be true to the collection’s literary worth.
Looking back at my in-text notes, it seems the very thing that makes most people swoon over Moore—her wordplay, her odd expressions, her breathless use of exclamation points, her scorn for the ordinariness of Midwestern life—were all things that irked me. My annotations read: “Gag.” “Too cutesy.” “Is this what she really thinks of the Midwest?” Of course, just as often I would star a passage that struck me as particularly true or beautifully written; but if you were to crack open this copy of “Birds of America,” you might get the sense that I hated the book.
That’s not true though. I found much to love in this collection. I wrote that Moore had “taken the discussion outward, beyond the fragile boundaries of the interior, and discovered that a whole other world exists—one full of family, sick children and uncertain futures.” My review was not, however, uniformly positive—an opinion I’ve never lived down when in Moore’s presence—but on the whole, I gave the book a thumbs up and opined that “Moore’s command of language and keen sense of observation cannot fail her.”
My favorite story and the one that has stayed with me all these years was “Terrific Mother.” In the first paragraph Moore observes “She had entered a puritanical decade, a demographic moment—whatever it was—when the best compliment you could get was, ‘You would make a terrific mother.’ The wolf whistle of the nineties.” (I wrote “yes” next to these lines.)
We learn in the first two pages that the heroine Adrienne has killed the Spearson baby “when the picnic bench, the dowels rotting in the joints, wobbled and began to topple her—the bench, the wobbly picnic bench, was toppling her!” (If you don’t think I’m careful when I sit on picnic benches holding someone else’s baby, then you haven’t read the story. I treat other people’s infants like bone china. I was scarred by reading this story.)
No one blames Adrienne, but in her slow, sly way Moore shows the reader that no one can dish out blame better than the accidental perpetrator of a random, horrifying accident. The rage, confusion and sorrow that shape Adrienne’s life following the death of the baby are at the heart of “Terrific Mother,” and the “terrific” of the title speaks directly to the writing and the fine emotional tenor of this story. For that story alone, “Birds of America” is a keeper; but of course, I enjoyed other stories as well.
I also loved “Charades,” noting in my annotations that “this, this is a good story,” and I shared the Mother’s sorrow as Baby spends his days in the pediatrics ward of the local hospital in “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk.”
Later, when I had the opportunity to take a graduate-level fiction class with Moore as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at UW-Madison, I felt like I had come full circle. I remember taking out “Birds of America” and paging through it before my first class with her. I’ll admit I was nervous at that moment in a way that I hadn’t been when I was asked to review the collection.
But I had been so young when I reviewed it. I didn’t understand the gravity of the request or the importance of the undertaking. Because here’s what I have come to understand: that review literally was the start to what pulled me through to my inevitable and life-altering application to the MFA program. After spending years reading other people’s fiction and poetry and getting frustrated or excited about it (or both), all I wanted to do was write my own work. Had I not written a review of “Birds of America” that pleased my editor (and was turned in with great nervous trepidation two entire weeks early much to his amusement), I might not have had the opportunity to write about excellent and awful writing over the years, and I certainly would not have found the courage to develop my own writing.
Next up: “The Dirty Cowboy” by Amy Timberlake
Further reading:
Barbara Kingsolver and Lorrie Moore Among PEN/Faulkner Prize Finalists (NY Times: 2/23/2010)
Litagogo’s recap of a podcast featuring Moore
Lorrie Moore information page (with link to Salon.com interview)
Believer interview from 2005