I read a lot of Lorrie Moore in my twenties and have kept coming back to her stories since then. Her writing is genuinely funny, both in terms of what the characters say and think, and in terms of their personalities and assumptions, and the way they live their lives. It’s this blend of very readable, relatable prose, and her characters’ private yearning towards meaning and substance that gives the stories their resonance. Moore shows us the surface of life and the turmoil and dissatisfaction that can exist beneath it, too.
In this story, Zoe, who teaches History at a college in Illinois, keeps comparing her life with standards set by others – by her students, who evaluate her and sum her up in increasingly outraged complaints (“Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen”), and by her younger sister, who lives in a much more luxurious apartment in New York and is marrying an independently rich man “with an amusing little job in book publishing”. Characters tell jokes, conversations are unexpectedly witty, the whole story is light and engrossing, but there’s an ache of quiet desperation underneath it all. Zoe feels she’s going nowhere. What she has and achieves never feels like enough, she has an acute sense of failure without quite being able to pinpoint why, she insistently tells stories about another woman, who lost her sense of self and couldn’t survive, and she’s undergoing medical tests that she tries not to think about, but all the same, she laughs, dresses up for Halloween and pushes her deeper feelings away. For me, this is Moore at her best.
First published in The New Yorker, 1989 and available for subscribers to read here; collected in Like Life, Faber and Faber, 1990 and The Collected Stories, Faber and Faber, 2008
