Usually, when reading a book, I've got a highlighter handy to make sure I note the sections and sentences that stand out. The bits that ring true. Had I done so for Lori Moore's,
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, I would have been underlining the whole goddamn thing.
I was first familiar with Moore's short stories. Have you read
Real Estate? Jesus. What a story. It refuses to follow any formal or traditional rules of storytelling and doesn't completely piss me off for being unreadably experimental. It's just so natural.
During grad school, I read her most recent novel
A Gate at the Stairs, which was such a letdown. First, I should let you all know (the five of you reading this) that any work of literature that in anyway, deliberate or not, associates or references a post 9/11 landscape or mood or mentality or what the fuck ever, I find annoying and unnecessary. So, I should have known better. Because that is what this novel was touted as being. And the protagonist was so naive and unfortunate, the analogies and metaphors so abundant, that I wanted to jump onto the page and shake that character (whatever her name was) and then drive up to Wisconsin and shake Moore herself for the various and multitudinous contrivances. Like, how could a reasonable intelligent young woman in college not ever bother to second guess that her new boyfriend, who she thinks is from Brazil or something, is really some radical extremist from some Middle Eastern country? Or, why this same young woman would not question the family for which she nannies who is so obviously full of secrets, smarmy ogling from the dad, and uncomfortable compliments about perfume from the mom? (Why did she steal the nanny's signature scent? Why?!) I don't know. It was exasperating.
Which is why, after reading
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, I cannot even conceive that Moore would not be capable of creating the most authentic portrait of that strange time during adolescence as well as the time that follows it. Of navigating the constant inconsistencies of being and becoming a young woman. When you think you know everything and nothing simultaneously. Like when you start skimming the money from the till at the local amusement park where you work to fund your BF's abortion and taxi rides to concerts. Who doesn't relate to that? (Or just doing morally questionable, undeniably reckless, totally stupid shit when you're a teenager.)
This novel is short. 148 pages. And I could have read at least triple that. The beliefs and ideals conceived during the formative teen years are hard to shake. As is the disillusionment of what typically follows. Moore works between these two spaces so deftly, that I was left to wonder, as always, which of the spaces I would like to occupy more. Knowing nothing at all but being in the middle of figuring it out. Or knowing so much that the weight of experience begins to become a burden made exponentially heavy with sad truths and aching joints. It also perfectly and precisely captures the nature and nuance of that one significant friendship established between a pair of teenaged girls. You know, the one that is invariably considered a bad influence and your mother hates. And the one that can never exist beyond that time.
Yet in the years following, for myself, I abandoned even believing in niceness or being nice. I could scarcely control myself wherever I was, from telling everyone, anyone, what I thought of them. It was an urge, a compulsion, my tongue bitten a futile blue. That's a ridiculous thing to say. You must have been spoiled as a child. I couldn't stop myself. You are ungenerous. You parcel yourself out like an expensive spice. You idealize things; you're a narcissist. You seek only to etch impressions of yourself on someone else's face. It's a form of cheapness. You're cheap. You're patronizing. You're a fascist. You're a bully. I've always hated bullies. You look awful in that color. It was as if I'd been hit on the head.
