everything I read in April and May
An ode to Lorrie Moore, a lot of generational family dramas and an overall slower pace of reading, which I hope has officially ended
Lately: I’m on a desperate hunt for antique furniture for my new house, to modest success. Not only am I exploring St. Louis stores, I’m also learning exactly how to barter online, which has so far involved finding items on Chairish, seeing if the sellers are also on eBay, getting cheaper shipping quotes there and then attempting to lowball on price. As someone who’s never once so much as tried to negotiate over a salary offer for a new job, this is both uncomfortable and exhilarating. … In the kitchen, I’ve been slowly getting back into the rhythms of cooking and baking. The other night, we had company, and I made the sourdough blondies I wrote about back in November. My dad ate one, quickly grabbed a second, and then when no one was looking he snagged a third. They’re that good. … In other St. Louis shopping news, I feel like I need to make an addendum to my bookstore essay from last month. I didn’t include Subterranean Books, which is now our neighborhood store. It’s just the loveliest atmosphere, and the curation and staff recommendations couldn’t be better.
everything I read in April and May
In 2018, a New Yorker critic called Lorrie Moore “one of our best documentarians of everyday amazement.” I feel silly, at this point, saying anything so sweeping about what makes Moore’s work distinctive, since I’ve only read two of her novels and a few of her essays online. But I can tell you what her work makes me feel: joy, puzzlement, sadness, wistfulness, empathy, envy.
Envy because I would give anything to write half as well as she does. Last time I wrote here about books, I raved about “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital,” which prompted me to get “A Gate at the Stairs” at the library, which prompted to me to order Moore’s entire canon. The big box of books was one of the first things to arrive at our new house in St. Louis, and since we have no bookshelves, most titles are lined up on a windowsill, beckoning me — and also posing a more existential question: Why isn’t Lorrie Moore big-time, mainstream, capital-F famous?
Yes, she’s a literary darling, and her work has won all kinds of awards. But most voracious readers I know have barely heard of her. Yes, there’s a divide between literary and commercial fiction, and rightfully so. But these are not people who shop for their fiction at Target, which begs the question: Why aren’t Moore’s books displayed alongside Ann Patchett’s or Alice McDermott’s? Plenty of authors write gorgeous words that are also widely marketed and available at mainstream bookshops, and I wish Moore got that treatment.
Her writing is gorgeous and hilarious and, perhaps most importantly, accessible. Her sentences are complex puzzles; the words fit perfectly, but if torn apart, I’d never be able to put them back together myself. Her characters have pulses and hearts and wrinkles and pimples. They’re like no one I’ve ever met but also a little bit like everyone. (Take Sarah Brink in “A Gate.” She’s a woman in a messy marriage, the owner of a farm-to-table restaurant in the early aughts, childless in her early 40s, nervy and unable to set typical boundaries. You might think you understand her motivations. You don’t.)
I won’t sit here and type like I’m the first woman to discover Lorrie Moore. If you’re a writer, if you adore short stories, if you dig into New Yorker fiction on a regular basis — well, maybe this is all just cause for you to nod yes, yes, yes. But I do think it’s worth trying to get more people who read for pleasure — for laughs and tears and escape and general enjoyment — to pick up her books, even if that means ordering them online when a local bookshop doesn’t stock them. It’s worth the extra effort, I promise.
“A Gate at the Stairs” is the best thing I read this spring and the second-best thing I’ve read all year, after “Frog Hospital.” It tells the story of Tassie Keltjin, a college student without any real sense of who she is or what she wants to become. Tassie needs a job, so she interviews to be a nanny for a woman who doesn’t yet have a child — and who isn’t even pregnant. That woman and her husband then go on to adopt a biracial child, and Tassie becomes her nanny.
That’s the bones of the plot, but in typical Moore fashion, it’s almost an afterthought. “A Gate at the Stairs” is set soon after 9/11 in a college town in the Midwest (a barely disguised Madison, Wisconsin), and nothing I write here will do justice to the way it evokes its setting in place and time. There’s a mysterious foreign boyfriend, a brother who signs up for the military, missed emails, liberal yuppies, heirloom vegetables. Tassie’s dad farms fictional potatoes. I taste them in my memory whenever I think of this book.
Here’s what else I read over the past two months. Moving slowed my pace, but I’m back at it, thanks to the University City Library, which blows the D.C. system out of the water. (Sorry, D.C.)
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg: Always a sucker for a family drama, I’ve enjoyed Attenberg’s work in the past, and this seems to be the book that put her on the map. It was laugh-out-loud funny and also quite sad.
Within Arm’s Reach by Ann Napolitano: More sweeping family drama, this time with fewer laughs and more tears and frustration. The McLaughlin family’s inability to communicate — no, their active avoidance of anything even resembling normal human interaction — made me struggle at times to enjoy the story. But it’s a good yarn, and ultimately satisfying.
A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner: Between the descriptions of New York in the ’80s and the narrator’s inimitable voice, this coming-of-age story about a high school graduate savoring her last summer before college was both surprising and unique. The plot is based on the preppy murder in the summer of 1986, and the crime gives the story its backbone but not its heart.
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach: Espach’s most recent novel, “The Wedding People” has been on the New York Times’ bestsellers list for an eon. I read it last year. It was far-fetched but entertaining, and its wild success made me curious about Espach’s other work. “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance” is Espach’s prior novel, and it received a decent amount of acclaim when it came out in 2022 — but nothing compared to “The Wedding People.” That said, I liked it more. It’s the story of two sisters, one of whom dies in a car crash in the novel’s early pages. (I promise, that’s not a spoiler.) The sister who survives narrates the story as if she’s telling it to her dead sister, explaining herself, her actions, her choices — explaining that life goes on.
Tunnel 29 by Helena Merriman: Hey, look, a foray into nonfiction. My husband read this and talked so much about it that I raced to also finish it before it was due back at the library. It’s the story of an escape from East Berlin to the West in the 1960s, a well-reported, tight, focused look at one of history’s most confounding moments.
Confessions by Catherine Airey: There was a lot going on in this book. Too much. I liked the premise — another family drama told across three generations of women — but hated the number of twists and leaps it took to reach its conclusion. I wanted to sit more with the characters and understand their pain and confusion, but instead I felt like I got whiplash. One of the arcs, the oldest of the three women who leaves Ireland for New York in the early ’80s, was fascinating, and I wish the story had stayed with her longer.
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Great - I’m going to check out Moore.
Looking forward to reading some of those titles!