See What Can Be Done
Lorrie Moore
ALSO BY LORRIE MOORE
Bark
A Gate at the Stairs
Birds of America
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Like Life
Anagrams
Self-Help
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by Lorrie Moore
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moore, Lorrie, author.
Title: See what can be done : essays, criticism, and commentary / Lorrie Moore.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | “This is a Borzoi book.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006247 | ISBN 9781524732486 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524732493 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Literature, Modern—History and criticism.
Classification LCC PN85 .M66 2018 | ddc 801/.95—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006247
Ebook ISBN 9781524732493
Cover photograph © Adrian Lourie/Writer Pictures
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
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Contents
Cover
Also by Lorrie Moore
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Publication Acknowledgments
Introduction
Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983)
Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985)
Malcolm Bradbury’s Cuts (1987)
Anaïs Nin, Marilyn Monroe (1987)
John Cheever (1988)
Bobbie Ann Mason’s Love Life (1989)
V. S. Pritchett’s A Careless Widow (1989)
Stanley Elkin’s The MacGuffin (1991)
Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991)
Election Day 1992: Voters in Wonderland (1992)
Charles Baxter’s Shadow Play (1993)
Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993)
On Writing (1994)
Amos Oz (1996)
Christmas for Everyone (1997)
Starr–Clinton–Lewinsky (1998)
Ann Beattie’s New and Selected Stories (1998)
JonBenét Ramsey by Lawrence Schiller (1999)
Joyce Carol Oates’s Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Dawn Powell (1999)
Best Love Song of the Millennium (1999)
Titanic (2000)
Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Passionate Minds (2000)
Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000)
Matthew Klam’s Sam the Cat (2000)
Legal Aide: My First Job (2001)
Frederic Cassidy (2001)
Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2002)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (2002)
Darryl Pinckney and Caryl Phillips (2002)
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003)
John Updike’s The Early Stories (2003)
Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (2004)
Alice Munro’s Runaway (2004)
Joan Silber (2005)
Eudora Welty (2006)
Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter (2006)
Shakespeare: The Modern Elizabethan (2006)
One Hot Summer, or a Brief History of Time (2006)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2007)
Peter Cameron (2007)
Donald Barthelme (2009)
Clarice Lispector (2009)
Barack Obama (2009)
The Wire (2010)
Memoirs (2011)
Friday Night Lights (2011)
9/11/11 (2011)
GOP Primary Debate (2011)
Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss (2011)
Suzzy Roche’s Wayward Saints (2012)
Lena Dunham (2012)
Wisconsin Recall (2012)
Richard Ford’s Canada (2012)
Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief” (2012)
Homeland (2013)
Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013)
Bernard Malamud (2014)
Miranda July (2014)
True Detective (2015)
Making a Murderer (2016)
Helen Gurley Brown (2016)
Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America (2016)
Thoughts on Hillary Clinton, December 2016 (2017)
Stephen Stills (2017)
Acknowledgments
Anatole Broyard
(1920–1990)
Barbara Epstein
(1928–2006)
Robert Silvers
(1929–2017)
Publication Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which the pieces first appeared, sometimes under different titles and in slightly different form:
The Atlantic: “Leave Them and Love Them,” December 2004.
Epoch: Review of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Spring–Summer 1983.
The Guardian: “What We Were Reading,” December 4, 2009.
Harper’s Magazine: “Animal Instincts,” August 2013.
Los Angeles Review of Books: “Thinking About Hillary, at This Late Hour,” January 20, 2017.
Mademoiselle: “Love Lives of the Famous,” February 1987.
The New Yorker: “Legal Aide,” April 23 and 30, 2001; “Bioperversity,” May 19, 2003; “Wizards,” September 12, 2011; “Lena Dunham: Unwatchable in the Best Way,” March 27, 2012; and “Canada Dry,” May 21, 2012.
The New York Review of Books: “Made in the USA,” August 12, 1999; “The Odd Women,” April 13, 2000; “Patios & Poolsides,” November 16, 2000; “Artship,” January 17, 2002; “Burning at Both Ends,” March 14, 2002; “The Long Voyage Home,” October 10, 2002; “Home Truths,” November 20, 2003; “Unanswered Prayer,” November 4, 2004; “Love’s Wreckage,” August 11, 2005; “A Pondered Life,” September 21, 2006; “The Awkward Age,” September 27, 2007; “How He Wrote His Songs,” March 26, 2009; “The Brazilian Sphinx,” September 24, 2009; “In the Life of The Wire,” October 14, 2010; “What If?,” May 12, 2011; “Very Deep in America,” August 18, 2011; “Circus Elephants,” September 15, 2011; “Werner Herzog on Death Row,” November 10, 2011; “Sassy Angel,” January 10, 2012; “Which Wisconsin?,” July 12, 2012; “Double Agents in Love,” February 21, 2013; “Gazing at Love,” December 19, 2013; “Our Date with Miranda,” March 5, 2015; “Sympathy for the Devil,” September 24, 2015; “TV: The Shame of Wisconsin,” February 25, 2016; “A Very Singular Girl,” July 14, 2016; “The Case of O. J. Simpson,” October 27, 2016; and “Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills,” August 17, 2017.
The New York Times: “The Modern Elizabethan,” April 23, 2006.
The New York Times Book Review: “Ho
w Humans Got Flippers and Beaks,” October 6, 1985; “Give Me Epic, Give Me Tragic, Give Me Cheap,” October 18, 1987; “The Chekhov of Westchester,” July 10, 1988; “What Li’l Abner Said,” March 12, 1989; “Ordinary Life Always Went Too Far,” October 22, 1989; “Bobbo Druff’s Alcoholic Vaudeville,” March 10, 1991; “Look for a Writer and Find a Terrorist,” June 9, 1991; “Voters in Wonderland,” November 3, 1992; “God Does Not Love Aunt Ellen,” February 14, 1993; “Every Wife’s Nightmare,” October 31, 1993; “God Is in the Details,” September 29, 1996; “A House Divided,” June 28, 1998; “I’ll Cut My Throat Another Day,” November 7, 1999; and “The Wrath of Athena,” May 7, 2000.
The New York Times Magazine: “Best Love Song; Two Girls and a Guy,” April 18, 1999, and “A Man of Many Words,” January 7, 2001.
Observer: “Unsolving JonBenét’s Murder—Absent Narrative, Chaos Rules,” April 5, 1999.
The Yale Review: “Theater in Review,” January 9, 2007.
* * *
—
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
HarperCollins: “Titanic,” in Writers at the Movies: Twenty-Six Contemporary Authors Celebrate Twenty-Six Memorable Movies, November 14, 2000.
Penguin: “Better and Sicker,” in The Agony and the Ego, January 4, 1994.
Penguin Canada: Introduction to Modern Classics Moons of Jupiter, April 4, 2006.
Picador: Introduction to “Ethan Canin, ‘The Palace Thief,’ ” in Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, October 2, 2012.
Introduction
The title of this book—See What Can Be Done—is not a boast but an instruction. I received it with almost every note I got from Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books. He would propose I consider writing about something—he usually just FedExed a book to my door—and then he would offer a polite inquiry as to my interest: perhaps I’d like to take a look at such and such. “See what can be done,” he would invariably close. “My best, Bob.” It was a magical request, and it suggested that one might like to surprise oneself. Perhaps a door would open and you would step through it, though he would be the one to have put it there in the first place.
* * *
—
Most of the pieces in this book are what could be done, at least by me, as I immersed myself in seeing what others could do; cultural responses to cultural responses. However personal and idiosyncratic they are, the pieces by and large fall into the category of “reviewing,” although when a review gets long enough it may qualify as a “critical essay,” and when it is succinct enough it can be a remark. (Remarks are not necessarily lesser: I believe Bette Davis should have won a Nobel Prize for “Old age is no place for sissies,” a line Bob Dylan himself might covet.) Essays, reviews, occasional meditations are all included here. Whether there is really a reason to round them all up, even selectively, is a question I can’t answer. But I can say that I did the gathering because, looking at my decades-long life as a fiction writer, I noticed another trail had formed—a shadow life of miscellaneous prose pieces—and I wondered about it as a trip, if not precisely a journey.
The pieces begin in 1983 in Cornell’s literary magazine, Epoch (where I wrote reviews of books by Margaret Atwood and Nora Ephron), and they end, in time for the golden anniversary of the Summer of Love, with a take on Stephen Stills—thirty-four years of, well, stuff. I mercifully have not included every last thing, though it may seem as if I have; in the late 1980s when I was once introduced to a particular guest at a party, the guest said, “Oh, yes! I know you: you review books!” and my heart sank. After my debut collection of stories was published, Anatole Broyard, then a New York Times Book Review editor, was the first review-commissioner to phone me at my office in Wisconsin and offer me work. Slightly terrified, I kept taking his assignments. “I think I’ve become Anatole Broyard’s slave girl,” I said to my then beau. “I don’t know how to stop.” And indeed I probably wrote too many reviews, telling myself I needed the money.
But a fiction writer reviewing is performing—I still believe—an essential task. Very few practicing artists review the work of their fellow sculptors or painters or dancers or composers, and so the conversation is left to nonpractitioners. Although there are of course exceptions, and although the film directors of the French New Wave began as critics, and the sculptor Donald Judd wrote reviews of his peers, as did Schumann, Debussy (under a pseudonym), and Virgil Thomson, in general the medium and the idiom of criticism do not belong to artists. One cannot really dance a review of someone else’s dance. One cannot paint a review of someone else’s exhibition. Criticism can be a rarefied field, but that aspect is usually galling to the artist, especially when the artist feels misunderstood and is reminded that critics have never attempted let alone forged the creative work that they, the critics, nonetheless feel emboldened to evaluate. In the words of the jazz musician Ben Sidran: “Critics! Can’t even float. They just stand on the shore. Wave at the boat.” Or as Aristotle wrote in Politics, “Those who are to be judges must also be performers.” Conversely, perhaps those who are performers must also be judges—once in a while. And so a contribution to the cultural conversation—by narrative artists themselves, speaking in unmuddied, unacademic, unobfuscating critical voices—I thought of as a difficult but obligatory citizenship: jury duty. (One of the longest pieces here, coincidentally, is a defense of a jury.)
My own way of discussing the work of others, then, has been improvised and not grounded in any philosophy or theory other than lack of philosophy or theory. It has been, de facto, I assume, a practitioner’s take. As for technique, I have always aimed for clarity of utterance and organization but don’t always succeed. I often move every which way in attempting to track my own thoughts about someone else’s endeavor; sometimes I inappropriately include my own life in the conversation to show how narrative art intrudes, fits, or does not fit into the daily lives of those who are experiencing it. I have aimed for the human, but also for the eccentricities and particularities of the real encounter, and I do not always avoid stupidities. Sometimes I head for stupidities in order to discuss them, even if they are my own. Often a piece is constructed in a circular fashion, like a cat clearing a space before it naps. Other times I veer. I sometimes try to pull back as much as I can to look at something from a distance, without losing my balance. I then also try to move forward again and bear down.
When, in 1999, I began writing for The New York Review of Books, which published articles by people much better educated than I, but which also offered me more space than I was used to, my stance became that of the ingenuous Martian who had just landed on a gorgeous alien planet. With no agenda and only the usual amounts of research, I said, “What’s this?” I tried to figure out what feelings the piece contained, what it made the reader feel, what that said about our world and our lives and the feelings we value. I aimed for simple (I aspired to “deceptively simple”) and true. I aimed for bravery of opinion though I am not by temperament especially brave. But I admire iconoclasm if it is not too breezy or gratuitous. If what the Emperor was wearing was a mixed bag, I tried to indicate as much. I also tried to figure out what the Emperor had in mind, even if one is not supposed to guess at intention. I have tried to avoid petulance, Internet-ese, literary theory, the diction and dialect of the professionally educated critic, and never to use the word “relatable” instead of “sympathetic,” or “impact” as a verb, or any form of the word “enjoy,” which should be reserved for one’s grandparents or other relatives. I tried not to drag readers by the scruff of the neck and march them from paragraph to paragraph, point by point, but did not always succeed. I allowed myself asides and tangents and personal anecdotes because circumnavigating a thing—the napping cat again, patrolling for snakes—is sometimes a useful approach. First-person assessments engage me—Dorothy Parker’s review
s were full of them so she could employ her rapier with faux reluctance—and often the use of the first person is not arrogant but modest, hedged, and more accurate. One does not always have to write in the authoritative third-person voice of God: if you fail to sound like God (and you probably will), you may end up sounding like flap copy. The first-person pronoun can be a form of deference and is useful and precise when discussing the subjectivity and crowded detail of narrative art. It suggests one specific encounter paid close attention to. It appreciates the intersection of one individual reader’s life with the thing that has been read. It breathes air into the conversation—or can. It reveals criticism to be a form of autobiography. When someone once said to me, “Your pieces in The New York Review of Books are the only ones I can actually understand,” I knew it wasn’t praise—the speaker’s real subject was the difficult brilliance and impressive erudition of the other critics he admired there. Nonetheless, I decided to take it as a compliment. (One has to seize encouragement where one can.) Someone once also told me early on that there was a well-known list of six things a book review should always do. This caused me to break out into a cold sweat. I politely asked for the list but it was never given to me, nor did I ever find it anywhere, so I carried on, without knowledge of official requirements. And to this day I still don’t know what those six things are.
