Lorrie Moore is an American literary icon, her name often included alongside Alice Munro, Mary Gaitskill, Tessa Hadley and Joy Williams as contemporary masters of the short story written in English. In books such as her debut, 1985′s Self-Help, and the 1994 novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, her unique literary voice was regaled for its mordant wit, acute observation, character complexity and metaphorical brilliance. Every one of her stories has the emotional breadth and sustained imaginative bravura of a novel, most capturing confident, ambitious young women at life’s crossroads, struggling with unforeseen challenges and yet still engaging in clever banter.
Although Moore has been prolific over her 40-year career, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is her first novel in 14 years, and was as eagerly awaited as Cormac McCarthy’s final literary works. But the novel is not like any of her previous writings, even as it flaunts her characteristic intelligence, lyricism, dry humour and metaphorical originality to the point where her puns pun themselves, demanding extensive rereading.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is essentially a love story, a ghost story and a metaphorical ghost story. If that sounds enigmatic and confusing, it is meant to be. Moore has said that she’s enjoying watching her readers figure this book out, which she happily agrees is both “tender and gross”. Upon first reading, I thought that Moore had melded the structure of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (quoted in the novel’s epigraph) with the spectral quality of Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw.
So, what actually is this “tender and gross” narrative about? It is essentially two braided tales linked by serendipitous coincidence and conspiratorial imagination. The first is mostly set in 2016 around the time of Donald Trump’s ascendant presidential campaign. At its core, it’s the story of a man taking a road trip with the animated corpse of his former lover (a zombie!), who had committed suicide and was buried wearing her floppy red therapy clown shoes. The second consists of unsent letters written during the post-Civil War Reconstruction by an innkeeper living on the zigzag of the Mason/Dixon line to her deceased sister, describing one of her lodgers as “a limping Shakespearean actor of great handsomeness and racism”, whom we come to suspect is John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.
The first clue to understanding the metaphorical complexity of this short novel is to understand the title. Moore has said it “was my working title, and when I was using it, I thought of it as a sort of blues song title. But it is also meant to embody or suggest people who are not quite comfortable in the world … alluding to the spaces between life and death … a slight feeling of ‘I’ve got to make the best of this because I have nowhere else’.”
Both stories are travelling somewhere but going nowhere, elevated by magical realism and moving in and out of the bardo, the Buddhist state between life and death. In the first story, Finn, a history teacher who has been suspended from teaching because he refuses to give homework and also teaches maths to his students because he has found them incredibly inept, is visiting his elder brother Max, who has terminal cancer. At Max’s hospice outside New York, they watch the World Series, sharing their childhood love of baseball. Finn is also discussing his estrangement from his lover, Lily, who has had numerous unsuccessful suicide attempts, and who has been working as a therapy clown to keep her depressive impulses at bay. Their banter is clever and bitter. At one point Max exclaims, “She wants to die? Get her here. I’ll show her how.”
With some grim irony, Finn has to leave Max’s bedside when he receives a call from a member of Lily’s book group who tells him to come home immediately. Lily has drowned, and was hurriedly buried in a green cemetery before Finn was able to go to her funeral.
He arrives at Lily’s burial place and discovers her standing before him. “She smiled at him with a mouth full of dirt, her face still possessed of her particular radiant turbulence – yet watery, as if he were seeing not so much her face but its reflection in a pond. Her eyes were the dead bone buttons of a white dress shirt. Then suddenly colour, their greenish grey, washed into them.”
The pair proceed to take a road trip to the body farm where Lily really wanted to be buried, their conversation marked by reminiscence, love and food. They have sex. Moore lavishly describes the deterioration of Lily’s corpse as Finn attempts to hold on to their love. They banter as Finn attempts to understand suicide’s compulsion, its stranglehold on her brain. Their conversation is the one that all loved ones wish they could have had with those who have taken their lives, yet they arrive at no conclusion other than reifying their love for one another and agreeing that death’s seductive pull on Lily was irresistible. They continue their clever banter, Finn remarking to himself that “jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life”.
Ultimately, I found the clue to this novel’s deliberately enigmatic meaning in an essay Moore wrote for the New Yorker at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when we were all frozen in place, halfway between death and life, unable to travel yet watching the bodies pile up in front of the morgues.
Moore wrote, “We are in the zombie apocalypse, which my students have been writing about for well over a decade, so young people are mentally prepared. Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time: the virus can’t be transmitted when all of its hosts have died. So we are all social-distancing; that is, pretending to have died, lying very still, so the virus – the shooter in the school – won’t get us. ‘Nobody here but us chickens.’”
Read it, if you will, and come to your own conclusions. As other critics have said, the writer is entitled to all the interpretations gleaned from their work. Know that by wrestling with this strange work, you will be happily fulfilling Moore’s literary intentions.
I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home, by Lorrie Moore (Faber, $32.99)
