Lorrie Moore’s Death-Defying New Novel

And, of course: the birds. Not since Hitchcock had Norman Bates eye up Marion Crane (Crane!) in a motel room full of taxidermied crows and owls, while telling her that he likes to “stuff birds”—a rare triple entendre (remember Mother next door)—has anyone so exulted in avian symbolism. Moore’s characters experience their emotions and their body parts as birds; they turn into birds themselves. In “Willing,” a story from 1990, a woman named Sidra tunes out the drone of her dopey, destructive boyfriend: “She was already turning into something else, a bird—a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk—and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint.” Moore herself has, with sly self-mockery, invoked Stephen Sondheim’s line that excessive bird imagery is a sign of a second-rate poet. Whether woman or flamingo, Moore’s characters sound identical; perhaps the most revered and reviled feature of her work is that consistent and unmistakable voice. The people in her stories mishear and misunderstand one another, indulge in compulsive wordplay and defiant corniness. (“So, you’re a secretary?” Squirm and quip: “More like a sedentary.”) Her way of recostuming characters—ripping a wig off one and putting it on another, switching up their lines—recalls one of the rare accounts she has offered of her childhood. “I detached things: the charms from bracelets, the bows from dresses,” she once wrote. “This was a time—the early 60s, an outpost, really, of the 50s—when little girls’ dresses had lots of decorations: badly stitched appliqué, or little plastic berries, lace flowers, satin bows. I liked to remove them and would often then reattach them—on a sleeve or a mitten. I liked to recontextualize even then.”

The prop table having been assembled, the new novel begins. The voice that greets us is a shock. It is a nineteenth-century voice, a woman—Libby, the proprietress of a rooming house—writing to her dead sister: “The moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the perfect moment and speak to you.” She describes a recent arrival with wary amusement: “a gentleman lodger who is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood.” Alas, she says, “I have a vague affection for him, which is not usable enough for marriage.” The voice grows familiar; a small flock of bird references fly through the second page; and, for good measure, Moore tacks on a terrible joke. The gentleman lodger (“dapper as a finch”) tries to entice Libby onto the stage: “Why, Miss Libby, an Elizabeth should learn Elizabethan.” It is a warm, knowing welcome, with Moore Moorishly adorning the scene with her little puns, adding a hawk wing to a man’s hat, lighting our beady narrator just so. “I am personally unreconciled to just about everything,” Libby says. We are clued in to the lodger’s identity (the actor family, the secessionist loyalties). He is a notorious assassin, of course, taking cover.

The frame shifts: we are in the Bronx, in 2016. Finn, a teacher, sits at the bedside of his hospice-ridden brother, but he is distracted. He’s consumed with thoughts of his suicidal ex-girlfriend, Lily, a woman with chaos running through her veins, who left him, long ago, for another man. “It’s an extra room in the house of her head,” Finn thinks. “It’s like a spider inside of her telling her from its corner to burn down the whole thing.” Lily works as a clown—this is Lorrie Moore, after all—and once tried to strangle herself with the laces of her clown shoes. As Finn sits with his brother, he learns that Lily has, at last, succeeded. Or has she? For here she is, wandering a graveyard, a little wobbly, dirt ringing her mouth, not deeply dead but, she says, “death-adjacent.” She asks to be taken to a body farm in Tennessee and used for forensic research. Finn agrees—how could he not? Her face is “still possessed of her particular radiant turbulence,” he finds, with an ache. “You had to stick around for the show.”

Thus begins the first of two road trips featuring a corpse; it is this one, though, that is the engine of the novel. Never mind Libby, never mind the dear brother who’s in hospice, let him languish. The novel exists for Finn and Lily, for this journey—they bicker, have sex, square accounts—and specifically for Moore’s lavish descriptions of the degradation of Lily’s body. Her decay sets the clock running, just as Addie Bundren’s body set the pace of “As I Lay Dying.” Lily must be deposited at the farm before it becomes too apparent that she is a corpse (this requires some sleight of hand at a roadside inn) or before she dies completely and attracts the buzzards that wheel overhead. Slapstick inevitably ensues, but most of the telling unfurls in a language of ravishment and wonder. Even as Lily’s mouth begins to reek, Finn cannot kiss her enough. He bathes her with infinite tenderness: “She was now sheer as the rice wrap on a spring roll, the bean sprouts and chopped purple cabbage visible inside her.” Can he not keep death at bay, can he not keep her a little while longer? Her torso starts to swell, she attracts blowflies, she is gorgeous. He loves her every incarnation.