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Fiction. Literature. Short Stories. HTML: In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships. One prefers to speak on the phone rather than face his friends, another lets the answering machine do all the talking. But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love..… (more)
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The eight stories in the collection feature characters that are at the same time ordinary and distinctive. Many of them are lonely and/or somewhat desperate to find romance. One of Moore's finest techniques is the way she uses small details in the setting or secondary events to create a mood that suits her main character's emotional state. In "Two Boys," for example, Mary has moved to a new and very dull town following the breakup of a bad romance. We know by this description that that the move was probably not her best choice:
"She lived in a small room above a meat company--Alexander Hamilton Pork--and in front, daily, they wheeled in the pale, fatty carcasses, hooked and naked, uncut, unhooved. She tried not to let the refrigerated smell follow her in the door, up the stairs, the vague shame and hamburger death of it, though sometimes it did. Every day she tried not to step in the blood that ran off the sidewalk and collected in the gutter, dark and alive. At five-thirty she approached her own building in a halting tiptoe and held her breath. The trucks out front pulled away to go home, and the Hamilton Pork butchers, in their red-stained doctor's coats and badges printed from ten-dollar bills, hosed down the sidewalk, leaving the block glistening like a canal. The squeegee kid at the corner would smile at Mary and then, low on water, rush to dip into the puddles and smear their squeegees, watery pink, across the windshields of cars stopped for the light."
The little details say it all. Mary has been sending post cards to friends bragging that, for the first time in her life, she is dating two men at the same time--but neither one is the man of her dreams. The description above parallels the reader's perception that something isn't quite right in her life, no matter how hard she smiles, no matter how fast she tried to run upstairs, no matter how much water pours over the sidewalk. It's an image that recurs throughout the story.
Small but odd events take on significant meaning in the lives of Moore's characters. "Joy" revolves around a woman taking her cat to the vet for a flea bath; in "You're Ugly, Too," Zoe attends a Halloween party dressed as a bonehead and is set up with a man dressed as a naked woman. Mary ("Two Boys"), sitting in a park, is spat upon by a llittle girl dressed way beyond her years.
This may all sound rather depressing, but the amazing thing is that it isn't. Moore writes with humor and with affection for her characters, most of whom just pick up and keep on trying. They are people that I feel that I know well.
Moore's first novel, [A Gate to the Stairs], has gotten mixed reviews, but it was a finalist for the 2010 Orange Prize. It's sitting on my TBR shelf, and I look forward to reading it soon. She is an extraordinary short story writer; hopefully I will be able to say that she is an extraordinary novelist as well.
I bought this book because of a great short story I read in The New Yorker. These aren't as good, but I think probably because they're older. I mean, she's gotten better. A little mannered in places. But good.
People with money would spend six dollars on a cocktail for themselves but not eighty cents toward a draft beer for a guy with a shirt like that. Rudy would return home with enough cash for one new brush, and with that new brush would paint a
I can’t say that I enjoyed reading these stories, yet I did find them all memorable which speaks to the quality of the writing. At times these bleak stories hit close to home with recognizable emotions and feelings as she details life’s trite experiences. Stories about trying to disguise an empty life, or attempting to stay true to one’s muse are delivered in a sharp, incisive and witty manner that emphasizes rather than disguises the characters’ disorganized lives.
Complicated, cruel and cynical, the stories in Like Life speak to all of our insecurities and make the reading of it a very personal experience.