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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
March 3, 2008 |
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Several years ago I was part of a small group that met weekly in a library next to a hospital to read literature and discuss its healing power. One week the moderator brought in a story she’d found in The New Yorker called People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk by Lorrie Moore. The story of a small family–Mother, Husband, and Baby–in a pediatric cancer ward, this wasn’t literature as healing, it was cold, brutal, unflinching honesty. This was the story of a mother struggling with the possibility that she might lose her child, and not wanting to be part of the strange community she’d found herself thrust into, especially the people who’d already been there, who were trying to make the best of things. Asked by the Husband, “Don’t you feel consoled, knowing we’re all in the same boat, that we’re all in this together?” her internal reply is,
But who on Earth would want to be in this boat? the Mother thinks. This boat is a nightmare boat. Look where it goes: to a silver-and-white room, where, just before your eyesight and hearing and your ability to touch or be touched disappear entirely, you must watch your child die.
Not all the stories in Moore’s collection The Birds of America are so grim, but, ranging from a Christmas story about a family to a daughter of Romanian immigrants who works as a librarian to an aging actress, she explores characters who are aimless and searching for a connection to something, anything. At first glance they’re like blown glass, but touch them, and you realize they’re more like marbles: heavy, and solid. They are all of us, and Moore treats everyone equally. As Olena in Community Life says, “That’s why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just ‘where is it?’.”
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