Lorrie Moore hides beneath layers of talent and the dazzling obfuscation of a great storyteller. The longtime Madison resident remained a very private person over the 20 years I covered the arts there, including her own literary output. It’s partly because she’s among America’s most acclaimed fiction writers—winner of the short story’s preeminent prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, an O. Henry Award winner and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, among other accolades. But See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary (Knopf) uncovers another layer, a deep motherlode of essays and criticism, from The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review or The New Yorker, among other publications: 35 years of what she self-deprecatingly calls “using another part of my brain.”
She concurrently taught creative writing at UW-Madison, until Gov. Walker’s draconian budget cutbacks left UW unable to match a professorship offer from Vanderbilt, in 2014, as her son approached college age. Nashville now seems an exile for a cultured New York state native who long ago embraced a Midwestern lifestyle and sensibility. She comments incisively on the 2012 Wisconsin recall of Walker, and on the 2016 election, which means “almost 3 million people were disenfranchised…would we not plot regime change of a country with a similar sham democracy?”
Moore is a storyteller-critic and this 400-page collection reveals perhaps our finest literary switch-hitter since John Updike. Moore’s authorial qualities bless her non-fiction: sly wit and humor, burnished and felicitous style, and deep flashlighting into human character, whether fictional or of authors reviewed or represented in biographies read. I found myself re-reading some essays, plowing through the litter of my underlining, for the sheer pleasure of it.
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She savors excellent writing, with shrewdness and humanity. She quotes generously, and never takes easy critical potshots. Above all, she leads readers on a glowing pathway to the heart of the matter. One of her favorite modifiers is “heartbreaking.” She’s finely attuned to a story or novel’s emotional tuning fork, which can place a palpable imprint on a reader’s soul. Some sexists might then infer that she mainly reviews women writers. Her paragon among female authors, Alice Munro, does claim three reviews here. She covers Ann Beattie, Norah Ephron, Bobbie Ann Mason, Margaret Atwood, Eudora Welty, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and the eccentric Brazilian Clarice Lispector.
Yet just as many outstanding male writers arise, and Moore posits Updike (a fellow PEN/Malamud Award winner) as “American literature’s greatest short story writer, and arguably our greatest writer without a single great novel.” She also deliciously unpacks meaty television series, including “The Wire,” “True Detective” and the sorry Wisconsin saga of “Making a Murderer,” among others. Her characterization of Beattie seems like self-description. She knows “that when you put people in a room together they will always be funny…No other writer manages such warmth and coolness simultaneously…there are no loud noises or bright colors; there is little overt grief, rage, or giddiness.” Moore’s serene, puckish equanimity, even in rough emotional waters, typically buoys her stories with seductive comic poignancy, and helps make her a lighthouse of a critic.
