Bark

The eight stories that make up Bark, Lorrie Moore’s first collection in 16 years, are, on the surface, typical fare. They deal, in a blackly comic style that has become Moore’s trademark, fixated on crumbling relationships and their ruined aftermath, rippling with anger, betrayal, the melancholy of passing time, and a peculiar sense of disconnection that verges on the surreal. And in decorating their backdrop with relentless newsworthy and pop culture references to war, terrorist attacks and celebrity deaths, these are also stories that strive to put their own shape on already clearly defined moments. Bark has a word-play quality that implies not only aggressive or defensive sounds but also a rough, protective outer layer, and these aspects echo repeatedly through the stories. The dialogue is never less than a delight, and the revelations break in waves, but their lingering sensation is, all too often, one of hollowness.

“Thank You For Having Me,” is an account of a woman in the days following Michael Jackson’s passing: “I tried to think positively. ‘Well, at least Witney Houston didn’t die,’ I said to someone on the phone. Every minute that ticked by in life contained very little information, until suddenly it contained too much.” Accompanied by Nickie, her giantess daughter, she attends the second wedding of their one-time beautiful Brazilian babysitter, Maria. Also attending, as band-leader and best man, is Maria’s first husband, who occupies himself by filling the country air with songs like “I Want You Back” and a weird Dylanesque rendition of “I Will Always Love You”. And as if this were not enough, the show is soon gatecrashed by a crew of Harley-roaring, gunwaving Hell’s Angels.

“Debarking,” which unfolds in tandem with the invasion of Iraq, sees Ira, recently divorced, struggle with his daughter Bekka’s weekend visits, while falling into a strange relationship with Zora, a woman whose intimacy with her pubescent son Bruno extends to games of footsie and even bed wrestling. Apparently, though, “Sanity’s conjectural.” If these stories have the feel of a potential sitcom premise then their outright comedy is balanced somewhat by the book’s more poignant interjections, and it is these that lend Bark a saving semblance of depth.

In “Foes,” a left-leaning biographer argues with a Republican lobbyist until he realises she has survived the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, but at a price.

And in “Reverential,” the collection’s finest story, a woman, and her partner Pete, visits her teenage son in a psychiatric hospital. This is a beautifully measured story, with every sign — a ringing phone, photographs, a turned head — standing as symbolic. The details unfurl with subtlety: we learn the son has taken to cutting himself, and that the couple’s relationship has broken down but, for the boy’s sake, they are keeping up a pretence. The charade stops outside the hospital walls, because Pete has someone else. Where some of the other stories in Bark seem to wallow in their cleverness and end up striking the pose of gimmickry, “Reverential” feels genuinely truthful. A story of lost love, it speaks of the emptiness that can make up life once the protective surface has been peeled away.

Lorrie Moore boasts a well-earned reputation as one of America finest writers and the finest moments in Bark certainly make the book worth reading, but it is a collection that falls a furlong or two at least short of greatness.