8/10/2023 0 Comments Madcap experiment modern![]() ![]() ![]() The pacing is slow the tone is muted, questioning, almost sincere. I Am Homeless doesn’t have the antic energy of Moore’s early novels, nor the combination of dismay and exuberance that we find in many of her short stories. At its end, he’s left alone to grapple with loss.Īnd yet the novel is tonally and stylistically quite different from the works that have preceded it. Over the course of the novel, Finn toggles between these two dying, then dead, intimates. They are linked through Finn, a cranky schoolteacher, who is Max’s younger brother and Lily’s ex-boyfriend. There’s Max, a middle-aged father with late-stage cancer, and Lily, a charismatic, mentally ill woman who ultimately takes her own life. It’s no surprise, then, that her most recent work of fiction, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, describes two characters dying before their time. ![]() And there’s a dark turn near the end of the passage, the realization that the dying, no matter how old they are, always leave this world too soon. There’s a cliché (“when all was said and done”), followed quickly by a riff on the cliché (“all was never said and done”). There’s an elaborate simile that expands over the course of a sentence. Its tone is wry, almost weary, as if KC is older than her 38 years. The passage is trademark Moore, blending the tragic and the comic, the serious and the pointless. KC herself imagined dying would be full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done. She’s been spending time-arguably too much time-with her elderly neighbor Milt, and she has mortality on the brain. In “Wings,” a story from Lorrie Moore’s 2014 collection, Bark, KC, a failed musician, muses on what it might be like to die. ![]()
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