The Books: “Birds of America” – ‘Community Life’ (Lorrie Moore)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story ‘Community Life’.

Lorrie Moore has a way of skewering certain pretensions … she pulls no punches, and yet somehow it doesn’t come across as vicious, or agenda-driven. It just seems amusing. The way you suddenly find yourself in the midst of a group of people who REALLY take themselves seriously … and sure, sometimes it’s enraging … but most of the time (at least for someone like myself) – its more AMUSING than anything else. I suppose that’s because I love the human animal, in all its bizarre forms – and everything is fodder. If you get into a constant state of rolling your eyes in contempt at your fellow man … well, that might make YOU feel better, and superior – but then you become part of the problem. A bigger problem, in my opinion. I refer fondly to such types as “blights upon the earth”, but let’s move on. My point is: Lorrie Moore definitely does not sugarcoat these issues, and she doesn’t hold back from making fun of people … it’s her touch that I appreciate. It’s not what I would call a light touch … but somehow it doesn’t have that underlying viciousness that so turns me off. What happens in this story – ‘Community Life’ – is that Olena is a Romanian woman, who is now living in Vermont. She’s not a recent immigrant, although she still speaks Romanian … and doesn’t quite understand what it is driving the people around her. She is dating a guy named Nick – who is an activist. Doesn’t matter for what cause. He’s a professional activist. He is on committees, and neighborhood boards, he goes to meetings, he talks about “issues” – it’s all very Vermont-ish. Lorrie Moore obviously has opinions about people who spend all their time trying to make OTHER people’s lives better … she’s one of the LEAST earnest writers I know. She’s more selfish. Like most artists. She’s interested in the subjective. And so she looks at people, the do-gooders, I guess you’d call them – and she doesn’t despise them, or have contempt for them … it’s just that her characters don’t “get” it. They aren’t “on board”. Olena goes to meetings with her boyfriend, and finds herself in the midst of all this busy-ness, this “activisim” – and feels like a total foreigner. She has other concerns. Like her problems with her boyfriend. Other things. This sense of “community life” – you know, that everything has to be put up for a vote, everything must be discussed and hashed over in an exhaustive manner … Olena thinks everyone is nuts. She cracks jokes. Someone comes up to her and makes some earnest comment, and Olena responds with a stupid pun, or a corny joke. She is not accepted – because one of the primary concerns of this kind of “community” is that everyone take themselves seriously, and everyone must be serious about the “issues”. Olena is a librarian. An intellectual. An introvert. Not really into sitting around in big groups, dealing with “community life” on a daily basis.

The following is an excerpt that perfectly shows Moore’s “touch” here. Like I said, it’s not a light touch – notice how she comments on what there is to eat at such meetings … I mean, come ON!! – but somehow the overall effect is comedic. And I’m not quite on Olena’s side, because I don’t quite know her yet … but I do know that I am interested in her response, her baffled response to the earnest community. Nothing worse than being earnest and having the feeling that someone might be making fun of you for it. Olena looks around at all this participatory democracy stuff, and feels exhausted by it. It’s hysterical.

EXCERPT FROM Birds of America: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries), from the story ‘Community Life’.

The fund-raiser was in the upstairs room of a local restaurant called Dutch’s. She paid ten dollars, went in, and ate a lot of raw cauliflower and hummus before she saw Nick back in a far corner, talking to a woman in jeans and a brown blazer. She was the sort of woman that Nick might twist around to look at in restaurants: fiery auburn hair cut bluntly in a pageboy. She had a pretty face, but the hair was too severe, too separate and tended to. Olena herself had long, disorganized hair, and she wore it pulled back messily in a clip. When she reached up to wave to Nick, and he looked away without acknowledging her, back toward the auburn pageboy, Olena kept her hand up and moved it back, to fuss with the clip. She would never fit in here, she thought. Not among these jolly, activist-clerk types. She preferred the quiet poet-clerks of the library. They were delicate and territorial, intellectual, and physically unwell. They sat around at work, thinking up Tom Swifties: I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.

Would you like a soda? he asked spritely.

They spent weekends at the Mayo Clinic. “An amusement park for hypochondriacs,” said a cataloger named Sarah. “A cross between Lourdes and The New Price Is Right,” said someone else named George. These were the people she liked: the kind you couldn’t really live with.

She turned to head toward the ladies’ room and bumped into Ken. He gave her a hug hello, and then whispered in her ear, “You live with Nick. Help us think of an issue. I need another issue.”

“I’ll get you one at the issue store,” she said, and pulled away as someone approached him with a heartily extended hand and a false, booming “Here’s the man of the hour.” In the bathroom, she stared at her own reflection: in an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking>

She went into the stall and slid the bolt shut. She read the graffiti on the back of the door. Anita loves David S. Or Christ + Diane W. It was good to see that even in a town like this, people could love one another.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked him later at home.

“Who? What do you mean?”

“The one with the plasticine hair.”

“Oh, Erin? She does look like she does something to her hair. It looks like she hennas it.”

“It looks like she tacks it against the wall and stands underneath it.”

“She’s head of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. Come September, we’re really going to need her endorsement.”

Olena sighed, looked away.

“It’s the democratic process,” said Nick.

“I’d rather have a king and queen,” she said.

The following Friday, the night of the Fish Fry Fund-raiser at the Labor Temple, was the night Nick slept with Erin of the Bayre Corners Neighborhood Association. He arrived back home at seven in the morning and confessed to Olena, who, when Nick hadn’t come home, had downed half a packet of Dramamine to get to sleep.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his head in his hands. “It’s a sixties thing.”

“A sixties thing?” She was fuzzy, zonked from the Dramamine.

“You get all involved in a political event, and you find yourself sleeping together. She’s from that era, too. It’s also that, I don’t know, she just seems to really care about her community. She’s got this reaching, expressive side to her. I got caught up in that.” He was sitting down, leaning forward on his knees, talking to his shoes. The electric fan was blowing on him, moving his hair gently, like weeds in water.

“A sixties thing?” Olena repeated. “A sixties thing, what is that – like ‘Easy To Be Hard’?” It was the song she remembered best. But now something switched off in her. The bones in her chest hurt. Even the room seemed changed – brighter and awful. Everything had fled, run away to become something else. She started to perspire under her arms and her face grew hot. “You’re a murderer,” she said. “That’s finally what you are. That’s finally what you’ll always be.” She began to weep so loudly that Nick got up, closed the windows. Then he sat down and held her – who else was there to hold her? – and she held him back.