Imitating Lorrie Moore’s ‘Self-Help’
The affectless biographical experience of the imperial elite.
Back in January I inflicted an imitation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland on you all. The proximate justification being that my professor this semester encourages students to do stylistic imitations as a way of exploring different techniques for a subset of the expected short critical papers.
I’m back again with an imitation this time of Lorrie Moore’s short story “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)” from the collection Self-Help. Before that, I’m going to talk about that book and its relationship to my current novel project.
Moore’s collection came out in the mid-80s, and was influential in the development of a restrained style of short fiction, featuring flashes of constrained interiority, and a fairly plain prose style. In some ways this was a continuation of the midcentury restraint of the New Yorker Short Story form, but Moore’s formal experiments: timelines, journal entries, second person and so on, gave new life to that exhausted form. She rides the line between spare strains of modernism and the psychic repression of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney’s Reagan-era output.
I found something beautiful in Moore’s work—there is a radical compression of detail and incident that becomes an act of biographical editing for a character. Whole eras of life, whole relationships, can be reduced to the smallest of gestures and details and incidents. We’re used to this now, probably people were used to it then, but seeing this technique work well is still one of the great joys of short fiction, and it can help radically compress information in longer projects.
To oversimplify, Moore, like McInerney and Easton Ellis, mostly wrote about the educated upper-middle class, at least in this flat second person mode. I think it’s interesting that a lot of bourgeois American fiction in the last half-century is about externalizing internal processes. For Moore, objects, gestures and clothing take on heightened importance and structure dramatic relationships. This makes her stories deeply emotional without requiring particularly deep interiority.
By contrast, for many later writers—Ben Lerner, climate fiction generally—flatness doesn’t invest the outer world with greater meaning; instead flatness of affect arises from the negation of internal processes by unchangeable external circumstances. I think that move, historically, is silly, because many other writers have lived through much dumber times (Feudalism, the Cold War) and still remained committed to a psychic structure of literature where the internal world was large enough to spill out and invest the external world with powerful personal emotion.
The book project I’m working on now, which I jokingly refer to as [Burgerreich Amerikkka] (I’m superstitious about putting its real name in writing) could use that radical compression. There are in it three narrators: A maoist barista, a fascist streamer and a liberal defense contractor. An American defeat in Iran brings all three into overlapping conspiracies to remake or overthrow the U.S. empire, culminating in a putsch attempt.
The defense contractor, Lawrence Campbell, is the streamer’s cousin. His sections are told in a second person present tense similar to some of Moore’s stories. I’ve been having trouble writing his family and political background, so I took Moore’s device of the reverse chronological timeline and used it to give Lawrence’s life a little more coherence. Find below the craft justification and imitation I turned in.
I had so much fun doing this that I extended it a little bit, not all the way back to the character’s birth year, but a bit more than the paltry page limit for the assignment allowed.
Annotation: [Burgerreich Amerikkka] by way of Lorrie Moore
Note: Apologies for any typos, I was at a hockey game last night and didn’t give this a final proofread, also this is silly and probably bad.
I was impressed by Moore’s ability to merge long sweeps of time with quotidian details. This technique is most formally visible in “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes),” though similarly effective spans happen in “How to be an other woman,” “What is Seized,” and “How.” In (Notes), Moore writes a present tense second person, mixing personal event with broader social context to give snapshots of individual years in the life of one character and to show this character’s relationship with her deceased mother.
Moore’s characterization happens through a combination of micro-scene, selected detail, repetition and small flashes of interiority, and the economy of time—a year summarized in a few sentences—is a fascinating constraint.
In [Burgerreich Amerikkka] one of my narrators, Lawrence Campbell, has a dead father. Their relationship has resisted me. Lawrence’s sections are written in a present tense second person. I hope this imitation of the form and style of (Notes) will push me past the first layer of Lawrence’s consciousness and personal history.
The annotation below has some problems, namely in the tension between form and content. Moore’s stories work because of their lightness of touch and because she is writing familial or romantic relationships that are very earnest, even if she uses irony in commenting on them. The narrative techniques she uses in (Notes) felt unbelievable when applied to a late-20s man of my generation, so I adapted them somewhat:
EXCERPT:
2026. Years since you buried him, clean his old hunting Mauser, murmur to the bolt “Quiet,” “When?” “Turn softly now,” as you work it back and forth, the lugs worn and clattering and the firing pin a little loose, like a knee with a torn ligament.
In your dreams soldiers with torn up bodies, heads lowered as against the rain, tramp through the valleys, walking wounded, jostling you.
In the bathroom your roommate is playing “when the party’s over,” on the bluetooth speaker. Now it’s “When I’m Small.” They’re getting ready to go out. They don’t know about your father’s gun.
2025. The whir, the clack, the rise of the drone. The whistle of the falling shells. These are the sounds that organize your life in the dismal stretches above the Caspian, where the winter rains will never end. The crunch of wet gravel underfoot, the roar of truck engines with no traction, the jokes in English, German, Lithuanian. Your laugh turns bitter, turns angry.
The war happens anyways, though you tried to stop it, quietly. Best you could.
Date a Yale girl. She writes you letters, says: “I wish I could still have you here. October is the cruellest month to be separated. There are cider doughnuts at the farmers markets, and you should see the trees in Rock Creek turn gold, turn red.” She recalls on the page how you kissed her the night before you left for war, licked the tears off of her burning cheeks. She felt like a mourner at your funeral.
2024. Go out into Virginia to watch the election at the house where your father was born, that moneyed, silent corner south of the river, where you spent your summers, only 15 miles from the city. It is election night and from the silence within, the darkness of the windows, you assume they know how it is going. It is like another century, the even trees standing bony out of the black lawn, the pale columns of the porch in the moonlight, the low spread of the silent brick wings, beyond them the tobacco fields, alien furrows in the unseasonal heat, so hot you are sweating in your shirtsleeves. There are ghosts here, of the Republic’s failures, hints of slave cabins buried in the berm above the creek where your father was teaching you to fish, the day the towers fell. “Our house goes back to Jefferson,” you used to brag in school, at Yale. You are all thats left now, you and your too-old grandparents watching the end of their party in the flickering blue of the den. You cannot go and face them.
You see his ghost standing in his shorts on the drive, it’s warm enough to wade.
2023. Bury him in the Episcopal churchyard below the Georgetown Pike. He refused Arlington, but they have come all the same, in their dress blues, his Colonels and Captains, to see you throw a spadeful of the beige spring clay on the black coffin. They see you looking at their metals, gleaming in the fine April sun. Their baubles and their trophies, pinned to chests by Caesars past and worn without thought. They see you in your civilian black, his son but not his heir. You mouth the words to their songs, and when the honor guard fires its blanks you flinch a little. Absently wipe a dirty hand on your trousers. They do not weep. They believe you envy their power. They believe there is some stain on you that keeps you from their brotherhood. Their tradition is his tradition. Their tradition is in the ground.
2022. Explain to him again that you have no wish to go through OCS. That the contractor sphere is enough.
“The power of the Republic,” he says. “Depends on men like you.”
Do not tell him—he is sickly pale, stomach distended with the accumulated fluid of failing pancreas, liver, kidneys—that you’re not sure the Republic is worth serving. There are the boxes of medals on the mantle by his in-home hospital bed. The folded flag in a box for his uncle: Americal Division, fragged 1969. For his grandfather: bombardier during Big Week over Berlin. He does not accept criticism of these men.
There is his picture too, Gulf 1, the highway stretching away to either side, Kuwait to the south, Hell to the north. Smiling young man with his airforce sidearm on his hip, aviators up on his forehead and his blue eyes visible. Three others next to him. Pilots come out to see their handiwork. Tourists on that blackened berm. Must’ve been after the end of the fighting. Around their feet melted rubber and broken glass and maybe the shards of bone, little dirty scraps of carbonized cloth.
Throughout his illness he has lost his muscles and his hair, his color and the texture of his skin, whittled down to nothing. Now he is swollen and corpulent with rot, the ruined portions of his body unable to escape. It cannot be long now; these years decline.
2021. In the fog of his latest round of chemo he asks after your college girlfriend. Instead of telling him that she dumped you years ago and works as a spook at an NSA data center in the middle of the desert, tell him that she followed her declared dreams. She is studying poetry in New York; you are conditionally together, but no longer exclusive. Distance, you say, is too great a solvent.
“Have a backbone, Lawrence, and marry that girl,” he says. Yessir, you say. That’s the right course, you say. You’ll do the honorable thing.
“You always must,” he says. “Our family has honor or it has nothing.”
2020. It has been nine months since last you saw him, cut off by the pandemic and the rebellion and your work. Post-school you are back in security, bouncing around the world, doing logistical work for the firms that supply rear echelon army units.
You are in the ruins of some Armenian village when he calls you. It is very early in the morning.
“We did it, Lawrence. Money and grace.”
“Will it change things,” You say, too tired to say anything else.
“Oh yes,” he says. “Dignity is back in the White House.”
“What’s that?” Ask him, archly. There is a child-sized shamshir on the floor, its plastic blade broken. The people are gone. There is a signed photo of Monte Melkonian. Someone has broken the frame. Defecated on the paper. The whole valley smells like shit.
The other contractors: French, Turkish, Colombian, are still asleep. The Azerbaijani minders are up with the dawn, smoking and squatting on their heels in the dry winter grass behind the village.
You want to go home.
2019. He gets the diagnosis after blacking out in his spotter plane up above the badlands. He came to, before crashing. Never blacked out in all his years in the Airforce. Bombing fleeing men and pulling heavy-gravity moves. Never phased him. Breaking the sound barrier. Not like you. You blacked out in 2015 when you heard the Turkish gunners firing on Şırnak even though that was your side of the war. Fell right down in the gravel on the hillside and woke up to the other American contractors laughing, saying this was why it was crazy for old man Campbell to send his son to war for a gap year.
He tells you from his hospital bed in Bismarck, where you find him two days after your organic chemistry midterm, he was facing into the west.
“So early in the day the shadow of the hills still buried the plains. But on the east faces of those hills, flowers, golden and purple and the tender green grass of spring,” he says. “That’s what I remember. Spring. Thought I was going to heaven. Thought I was going to find God.”
He pauses, swallows.
“Funny thing is, I put it down on a flat slope, and there was bitumen coming up out of the rocks. I didn’t find God. But by God, I found oil.”
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