Lorrie Moore and the difference between opera and life
Gate At The Stairs, the new Lorrie Moore novel, is delicious–Lorrie Moore always is.
It’s intriguing to read her now that the 80s are back in style. My students are wearing enormous swallowing cowl necks and off the shoulder cut and shorn and sweetly torn sweatshirts, all what I was wearing in neon and boucle when I was first reading Lorrie Moore. She is so 80s. At least for me. And we are circling back with a war in tow, a war and arugula and snow and the midwest. The novel is narrated by a college student and I read it with my students’ lives and my own 80s student life layered onto the novel like decoupage photographs. I’m a perfect reader for this book.
I had to skip an entire plotline (boy in Afghanistan).
Overall though to me Lorrie Moore is thick-delicious. I eat up these sweet tiered sentences, gobble them all whole….iced with metaphors and clotted with stunning summary, sparkled with puns….and interupted by horrible Tom Swifties….it’s a lot and I love a lot.
My favorite sentences:
“In Sufism we learned that Rumi was a man in love, and the absence of the beloved entered all his cravings, which it really didn’t do with Doris Lessing.” (That cracks me up. And reminds me of the Pandas. And how hard it was, teaching Rumi at Hope…all that desire and ecstasy and God together. Yikes.)
“…nothing was as cryptic and ripe for understanding as a boy’s love. What was an involuntary grimace I took to be rapture. What was a simple and natural masculine desire to be in, to tunnel and thrust, I saw as a tender desire to be sweetly engulfed and and at least momentarily overpowered by another’s devoted attentions.”
“Love should be helpful. Love should contribute something.”
“‘Women chew up their lives trying to heal themselves from the bad arrangements they’ve made with men; all this healing is not attractive. It’s boring.’”
“‘Don’t make your own life your project inyour own life: total waste of time. I don’t mean that personally. I mean that for everyone.’”
“He was working hard to sound upbeat and had landed on bizarrely merry.”
“The difference between opera and life, I’d noticed, was that in life one person played all the parts.”
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Oh, how I can’t wait to read this!
The Panda Rumi Raft was one of the best parts of that semester.