Reviewed by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

ALMOST a century ago, T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Eliot asks a compelling question, one that has no simple interpretation, much less an easy answer. And yet, it is one we have to contend with every day as we live in an age eclipsed by nuclear proliferation, by great scientific progress, by increasing individual choice but also the fragmentation of family — an age, as Lorrie Moore writes, of “disposables.”

Moore attempts, rather bravely, in the eight short stories in her new collection, Bark, to describe in piercing detail that moment right before the crisis that Eliot wrote about. Her first new collection to appear in many years, Bark has very little mention of any canine aggressiveness. But the novel does abound in a different sort of aggressiveness; that embedded in personal relationships. It is a collection of stories about relationships poised perilously on the edge of a colossal collapse. Ostensibly disjointed and separate as each story is, there is something dark and elusive that foreshadows all of them and connects them in an oddly coherent whole: the shadow of war.

In ‘Paper Losses,’ people read books about the Bosnian genocide at a beach where a family takes a last vacation together before being permanently scattered. ‘Juniper Tree’ has one of the most eerie and bizarre moments in the book, when a young teacher sings ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when she can remember nothing else, while saying goodbye to the ghost of a friend. And yet, for all the pervasive allusions, the stories are not about war. Set in America during different decades in the last 50 years or so, each story is about collapsing relationships; some ruined, some surviving their final stages, some tethering on the edge of a particular moment of crisis.

In ‘Referential,’ the mother of a deranged 16-year-old hungers for physical contact. Moore writes: “She once grew so hungry for touch she went to the Stressed Tress salon just to have her hair washed … at airport security she had chosen the pat-downs and the wandings rather than the scanning machine.” And yet, she has Pete, her boyfriend of eight years, a sort of stepfather for her son (who remains unnamed), who is clearly ebbing away from them, succumbing to dementia. At one point, while the two visit her son together at the facility where he is getting treatment, the boy suddenly asks Pete how “sparrows can kill the offspring of others.” When Pete says, “nature can be cruel,” the boy lashes out “Nature can be one big horror movie! But murder is not something one would expect — from a sparrow. All things can be found in the world — but usually you have to look for them […] For instance, you have to look for us! We are sort of hidden but sort of not.” Pete has nothing to say but the reader wonders about the range of things the boy’s innocuous comment could refer to; things we don’t recognise but that are happening around us.

Yet, in ‘Debarking’ we see a different kind of mother-child relationship. In this story, a recently divorced young man, Ira, has just started dating another divorcee, Zora, one of the most unique characters in the collection. Amidst the simultaneous oncoming of spring and the impending invasion of Iraq by American forces, Ira finds himself hopelessly in love with Zora, who, in turn, appears to be inordinately attached to her teenage son, Bruno. What makes Zora a memorable character is the way she loves; the quiet desperation with which she seems to be obsessed with her son has in its pitifulness, a beauty so complete, so dreadfully human, we find ourselves closer to her sometimes than to Ira, who should be the obvious victim. He feels increasingly distanced and slighted as Zora ignores him when the three are together. But Zora is indelibly and inexhaustibly Zora because she loves in a certain unique way that Moore convinces us of, despite all the warning bells her and Bruno’s relationship ring in the reader’s mind. One particularly poignant moment shows the two in their home, while Ira stands by feeling out of place: “It was in Zora’s bedroom, where, spread out half-naked on Zora’s bed … lay Bruno … Zora came in and pressed a cold glass of water against the back of Bruno’s thigh.

‘Yow!’ cried Bruno. ‘Here’s your water,’ said Zora, walking her fingers up on one of his legs.”

The way in which simple gestures in this scene condense the messy and uncomfortable mixture of love and intimacy in Zora and Bruno’s relationship is emblematic of the brevity of Moore’s prose, more particularly, her condensation of overwhelming emotions into sharp, concise gestures that reveal both complexity and beauty.

In ‘Paper Losses’ a middle-aged couple, right before getting divorced, decide to take a last vacation with their children as a family. After two decades of being together, Kit and Rafe’s marriage has disintegrated and their “old lusty love [has] mutated to rage.” The shadows of war and violence looms over this story more than the others, appearing in sudden shocks of information delivered in between details of daily life. For instance, we are told that Rafe makes model rockets in the basement as casually as we are delivered the other numerable small tragedies in their lives such as that “Rafe had not kissed [his wife] for two years.” This story stands out as it appears to depict the potentiality of hope coexisting with the certainty of pain within human relationships. Violence seems as naturally embedded in Moore’s prose as beauty: “I don’t believe in fighting,” Kit imagines saying to her husband. “I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding.”

There is something new and refreshing in Moore’s style. We pause and wonder, pause and put the book down, pause and reread the same paragraph three times because we feel that by breezing through it something indefinably valuable will be lost. Moore is holding up to us a world in which a mother takes her children to see turtles hatching in the morning only to see them gobbled up by birds just as they enter the ocean; in which a man packs up his television and gives it away because he cannot bear hearing about the “tonnage of bombs planned for Baghdad;” in which a woman’s dying words, “marry well,” are thought of by her daughter as “life-preserving but with a glimpse of a dark little bunker in a war not yet declared.” In short, it is the world we live in — volatile and prone to disaster, a world where the greatest tragedies happen perhaps not in distant battlefields, but within the home.

The only question is: in this atmosphere of impending chaos, amidst the eternal, almost final suggestion of loss and decay, are things ‘fixable’? Moore’s novel seems to bark “no,” perhaps not. But it is worth holding up the damage and seeing it anew, like children who go out to watch baby turtles hatching and scuttling into the ocean at dawn, with both surprise and wonder.

Bark

(SHORT STORIES)

By Lorrie Moore

Knopf, New York

ISBN 978- 0307594130

208pp.