Lorrie Moore is an American writer who takes her time – just six books in more than 20 years – and Bark is her first short-story collection in 15 years.
But there is a good reason for her leisurely pace in writing. Everything she writes is crafted to perfection, not a word out of place and not a false note. No surprise that she has a growing audience of discerning readers and has won a number of prestigious literary awards.
Not one of the eight stories in Bark is actually called Bark, and this at first creates something of a mystery.
The opening story is called Debarking. In it, a wife complains that her husband used to “bark” things at her like an angry dog. Life has gradually “debarked” him. But there’s a double meaning in giving this odd title to the whole collection.
Trees too can be “debarked”, just as dogs can be – they can have their thin, protective coating stripped off them. In all of these stories, people are depicted in emotionally fragile moments, when they’ve had their protective assumptions and certainties stripped away. The “bark” is what covers us before more essential truths are revealed.
Interestingly, the stressful moments in these stories nearly always concern couples or parenting. In Debarking, a divorced man starts seeing a divorced woman but discovers how hard it is for middle-aged people to resume dating when they are out of practice.
Desperate middle-aged women, reacting to the death of one of their friends, medicate themselves with gin as they face their unhappy singleness (The Juniper Tree). As she divorces, a wife expresses her utter primal rage at having been betrayed by her husband (Paper Losses).
In an excruciatingly awful and funny story, a man, seated next to his wife at a public banquet, finds himself having to talk with another woman whose political views are the diametric opposite of his own (Foes). And there is a riotous, outrageous and sad story of a wedding ceremony being disrupted (Thank You For Having Me); a story about a couple caring for a mentally unbalanced son (Referential); and a painful dating scenario where a woman shares a table with a guy she once thought glamorous (Subject to Search).
While it’s easy to tick off themes like this, the really important thing is how well these stories are written. Moore gives her stories texture and context by referencing them to recent events in American public life. The private and the political intermesh.
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Her skill with language is extraordinary. Of a man unexpectedly being chatted up by a woman, she writes: “Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in other people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.”
Of a fundraising dinner where arty people appeal to wealthy corporations for grants, she writes “here at this gala even the usual diaphanous veneer of seemliness had been tossed to the trade winds”.
What a book is “about” is only 50 per cent of its meaning. How it is expressed is the other 50. Moore scores highly on both sides of the sum, and Bark is an outstanding collection.
BARK
By Lorrie Moore
Faber and Faber $37
– Sunday Star Times
