Any new book by Lorrie Moore is a cause for rejoicing, but her first collection of short stories for 16 years demands bunting, revelry and tap-dancing. She is one of a handful or two of writers (I’d nominate Anne Tyler, William Trevor, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro among the rest) whose work is always worth buying. With lesser authors a tepid review might discourage purchase, but Lorrie Moore can fall foul of critics yet still be immensely entertaining.
So it is with Bark. The book begins with an absolutely marvellous long story, ‘Debarking’, in which almost every paragraph contains a fresh delight, something so funny and so true that the reader must exclaim aloud. Moore’s terrain is familiar to all who relish American realist fiction: families and their discontents, marriages and their disappointments. Here a newly divorced man called Ira (a character not unlike that portrayed by Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm) takes tentative first steps into the world of middle-aged dating. Zora is beautiful, enigmatic and quite probably mad, a fact which only gradually dawns on Ira, as her self-centredness reveals itself to be pathological: ‘He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.’
The scenes in which Ira dines with Zora and the dreadful teenaged son with whom she is besotted take the reader almost beyond comedy, into a place of rapt embarrassment. In this uncomfortable realm, too, are Ira’s encounters with his young daughter: ‘Poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off.’ Ira is sure that his little girl is unusually intelligent, but when she suggests Snowball and Snowflake as names for the two cats — neither of them white — he has bought as a sop, he feels let down: ‘Sometimes Bekka seemed completely banal to him.
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