The Books: “Self-Help” – ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Self-Help by Lorrie Moore – a short story collection. Excerpt from ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love’

Many of the stories in Self Help are hard to excerpt – they are delicate, all of a piece – and if you pull one thread out the whole thing unravels. Many of them have a “gimmick”, although I hesitate to call it that. Perhaps “device” would be better. One story (wrenching, I found it almost unreadable it was so sad) is told backwards, with years going down in number – what happend in 1980, 1979, 1978 – and each fragment has to do with the relationship the narrator has with her mother. So going backwards? You can imagine the nostalgia and pain … because when you know the end, when you know how it ends … it makes all the years of non-communication or petty fights or whatever seem so ridiculous. Like Emily at the end of Our Town. One story is called ‘The Kids Guide to Divorce’ – and it’s told in the present tense, another “how to” story – like: “do this, do that …” The stories are, like I said, delicate. Not fragile – just delicate.

‘Amahl and the Night Visitors’ is the story of a woman unraveling – during the Christmas season when her live-in boyfriend is playing Kaspar in a community theatre production of Amahl and the Night Visitors. Trudy narrates the story – and you can just tell – from her voice – that something is “off” with her. She is obsessed (literally) with her cat. It’s a new cat. She is terrified to let the cat outside. She frets. She refuses to open the door. The cat takes up all her brain space. It’s obvious that Trudy is afraid that Moss (her boyfriend, the “tenor of love” in the title) is having an affair with someone in the play … she becomes obsessed with that, too. She is always saying the wrong thing. Moss has his community theatre friends over – and they all talk about the play – and Trudy tries to make jokes and contribute, but she’s the kind of person who says something, and the entire room falls silent, everyone squirming with awkwardness. And Trudy doesn’t know how to change that. What should she do? She has no sentimentality. It’s not like she moons about the house, full of melancholy. Oh, no. Because then she wouldn’t be a Lorrie Moore character. Trudy is, on the contrary, almost creepily cheerful. She decorates the house. She puts on a happy face. But then there’s the ADD side of her personality. Trudy obsesses about her cat (and Moss, the boyfriend, has totally HAD it with the cat – he calls it names, he makes fun of it – he is so sick of Trudy’s obsessive-ness) – she watches news programs and frets about nuclear winter – she becomes convinced that Bob (a lovely man, also in the opera) is in love with Moss … she is just a MESS. And even though Moss can be cruel to Trudy, sometimes you think he has a point. No wonder why he sleeps over at Melchior’s house (that’s another funny thing – all of the cast members are referred to by their character names) … he just needs to get away from Trudy’s insistent WEIRD-ness which seems to obliquely have him as its focus at all times.

The story is from Trudy’s point of view – but it’s written in the “you” voice – which Moore uses a lot in the collection. “You walk down the street …” So everything ends up sounding like bizarre instructions. It is an odd distancing device – which I really appreciate. It gives her stories clarity, focus. She’s not too IN it … she’s outside it … we are outside, too … peeking in. This is not total immersion. Moore is about something else.

What I love most about Lorrie Moore’s writing is her details. She just burrows right into somebody else’s life … and sees through that person’s eyes. And not just sees – which is our most literal sense – but smells, remembers, touches, thinks … Everyone is specific in a Lorrie Moore story. Her characters are not interchangeable. They are quirky – but not annoyingly so. Lorrie Moore is not “arch”, she’s not hip or clever – even though the way I am writing about her may give you that impression. She’s fearless is what she is, and she writes how she wants to write. I read her stuff and it gives ME courage. I read her stuff and she inspires me to keep going, keep trying, keep honing in on my best way to write, to express. She holds a torch up for the rest of us.

Here’s an excerpt. As you can see – each “entry” in the story takes place on a different day in December – so it ends up reading like a weird diary, or date-book.

EXCERPT FROM Self-Help by Lorrie Moore – a short story collection. Excerpt from ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love’

12/9 Two years ago when Moss first moved in, there was something exciting about getting up in the morning. You would rise, dress, and, knowing your lover was asleep in your bed, drive out into the early morning office and factory traffic, feeling that you possessed all things, Your Man, like a Patsy Cline song, at home beneath your covers, pumping blood through your day like a heart.

Now you have a morbid fascination with news shows. You get up, dress, flick on the TV, sit in front of it with a bowl of cereal in your lap, quietly curse all governments everywhere, get into your car, drive to work, wonder how the sun has the nerve to show its face, wonder why the world seems to be picking up speed, even old ladies pass you on the highway, why you don’t have a single erotic fantasy that Moss isn’t in, whether there really are such things as vitamins, and how would you rather die cancer or a car accident, the man you love, at home, asleep, like a heavy, heavy heart through your day.

“Goddamn slippers,” says Morgan at work.

12/10 The cat now likes to climb into the bathtub and stand under the dripping faucet in order to clean herself. She lets the water bead up on her face, then wipes herself, neatly dislodging the gunk from her eyes.

“Isn’t she wonderful?” you ask Moss.

“Yeah. Come here you little scumbucket,” he says, slapping the cat on the haunches, as if she were a dog.

“She’s not a dog, Moss. She’s a cat.”

“That’s right. She’s a cat. Remember that, Trudy.”

12/11 The phone again. The ringing and hanging up.

12/12 Moss is still getting in very late. He goes about the business of fondling you, like someone very tired at night having to put out the trash and bolt-lock the door.

He sleeps with his arms folded behind his head, elbows protruding, treacherous as daggers, like the enemy chariot in Ben-Hur.

12/13 Buy a Christmas tree, decorations, a stand, and lug them home to assemble for Moss. Show him your surprise.

“Why are the lights all in a clump in the back?” he asks, closing the front door behind him.

Say: “I know. Aren’t they great? Wait till you see me do the tinsel.” Place handfuls of silver icicles, matted together like alfalfa sprouts, at the end of all the branches.

“Very cute,” says Moss, kissing you, then letting go. Follow him into the bedroom. Ask how rehearsal went. He points to the kitty litter and sings: “‘This is my box. I never travel without my box.’ ”

Say: “You are not a well man, Moss.” Play with his belt loops.

12/14 The white fur around the cat’s neck is growing and looks like a stiff Jacobean collar. “A rabato,” says Moss, who suddenly seems to know these things. “When are we going to let her go outside?”

“Someday when she’s older.” The cat has lately taken to the front window the way a hypochondriac takes to a bed. When she’s there she’s more interested in the cars, the burled fingers of the trees, the occasional squirrel, the train tracks like long fallen ladders, than she is in you. Call her: “Here pootchy-kootchy-honey.” Ply her, bribe her with food.

12/15 There are movies in town: one about Brazil, and one about sexual abandonment in upstate New York. “What do you say, Moss. Wanna go to the movies this weekend?”

“I can’t,” says Moss. “You know how busy I am.”

12/16 The evening news is full of death: young marines, young mothers, young children. By comparison you have already lived forever. In a kind of heaven.