The Loudly Ticking Clock

In one of her early stories, “How to Become a Writer,” Lorrie Moore says, “Insist you are not very interested in one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in—in—syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.” The music of language has always been Moore’s primary concern. Told by a writing instructor that she has “no sense of plot,” the narrator of “How to Become a Writer” scribbles, “Plots are for dead people, pore-face.”

A similar disinterest in plot can be found in the work of Lydia Davis, whose stories are preoccupied not with event, but with language itself. Davis’s stories tend to be very short—some as short as one sentence—whereas Moore writes longer, more traditional narratives (her stories do, in fact, have plots), but their work shares a sly sense of humor, razor-sharp observations, and a delight in wordplay. And in their highly anticipated new story collections, out this spring, both are in dialogue with writers who came before them. Davis’s Can’t and Won’t includes translated passages from Gustave Flaubert’s letters, and Moore’s Bark contains echoes of stories by the Brothers Grimm, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Bark is Lorrie Moore’s first story collection in sixteen years. Her much lauded Birds of America appeared in 1998, following the two collections that established her as one of the best story writers in America, Self-Help and Like Life. She has written three novels (most recently A Gate at the Stairs), but it is her stories that have earned Moore acolytes and imitators. “It was like a Lorrie Moore story,” friends say when trying to describe events that are heart-breakingly absurd. Moore’s lonely characters often find themselves in ridiculous situations, illuminated by Moore’s mordant wit. In her un-forgettable story “You’re Ugly, Too,” the protagonist, Zoe, is set up at a Halloween party with a man dressed as a naked woman. Zoe, perpetually single, is wearing a bonehead and trying to make conversation with a man with “steel wool glued strategically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.” The visual joke is irresistible—especially because his steel-wool pubic hair keeps sliding out of place—but like all good comedy, the story is tinged with sorrow. Zoe has recently had an ultrasound to examine a mysterious growth in her abdomen. She’s a lovelorn thirty-something woman wearing a bonehead and worrying that she has cancer. Humor is her coping mechanism. She tells Earl, the man dressed as a naked woman, that she had a speech impediment as a child. And when he asks her how she dealt with it, Zoe says, “I told a lot of jokes. Jokes you know the lines to already—you can just say them. I love jokes.”

Like Zoe, all of Moore’s characters love jokes. They make rhymes and puns, as if by controlling language they can compensate for setbacks in their lives. In “To Fill,” (from Self-Help) Moore writes, “Everything’s a joke. You’re always flip-flopping words, only listening to the edge of things. It’s like you’re always, constantly, on the edge.” And in one of her most affecting stories, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” (in Birds of America), a mother whose baby has been diagnosed with cancer wonders if she’s being punished:

Just once, before he was born, she said, ‘Healthy? I just want the kid to be rich.’ A joke, for God’s sake! After he was born she announced that her life had become a daily sequence of mind-wrecking chores, the same ones over and over again, like a novel by Mrs. Camus. Another joke! These jokes will kill you!

The...