More on Moore ...

"Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in the humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare. ... Where life was meagerer, where tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were needed. ... And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren't always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least."

Of course, Moore's novel is funny, though not in any consoling way, weirdly, beautifully, madly, angrily funny. These lines, from Tassie Keltjin, our narrator of A Gate at the Stairs, express not only the class-consciousness of Moore's novel, but also its interrogation of conventional ideas about comedy and tragedy, and the function of storytelling in general. In a post-9/11 world, what can be more tragic than the absurdity of a phrase such as "enduring freedom," a phrase which has the power to lead to all sorts of violence, rhetorical and physical and psychological? As the psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudillière have suggested in their work History Beyond Trauma, war ruptures the symbolic order and leads to a kind of madness, a break, a silence, a confrontation with an utter loss of meaning.

This is a deeply melancholic novel, bearing the marks of numerous losses that cannot be overcome or wished away. Moore refuses us all consolation (the tenderest expression of mourning here is also the novel's most mad moment). The novel addresses itself to the holes left by lost objects. Tassie is reading Rumi throughout, and though I don't know much about Rumi, what little I have read reminds me of the erotic poetry of Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross, whose love poetry to God is addressed, as Michel de Certeau has written, to a missing being. If God is dead in this novel, this loss still haunts with an absence nearly indistinguishable from presence, and it is to this haunting near-presence, which takes various forms in the novel, Tassie addresses herself.

While the novel is about class, education, race, war, and death, it is also, profoundly, about love. Not the kind of love that ends in a wedding, like a fairy tale, "Reader, I married him," but the kind poured out to an absence that will never answer. This novel ends with a witty, brazen response to Jane Eyre, to all novels of education and development and whatever definitions of the humanities they imply. Here, humanistic education is an education in the necessary impossibility of love.

But I don't want to overdo it too much. The novel is melancholically angry, too, about the violence that surrounds us, in small and large ways, and this bursts out in some of the most crazily funny lines and the most intensely lyrical descriptions I have read in recent years. This experience, more than anything else, is what stays with me.

Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, is tinged with a very special kind of madness that I have not experienced at such a pitch since reading Virginia Woolf for the first time as a young college student (around the same age as Tassie, Moore's narrator-protagonist). (I have, however, recently encountered it in Barbara Comyns's The Vet's Daughter, which was my favorite novel of those I read last summer, in the few free days of non-school-related reading.) It is, as J. Robert Lennon has remarked, a very strange novel. Moore, as always, is interested in the slippage of language, and she has given us here a narrator who is increasingly unmoored in language, constantly searching for a firm grip in a stream of retreating signifiers, and Moore has placed her in a plot in which certainty after certainty, object of desire after object of desire, is stripped away, laying bare the extreme lack at the center of something or other, a center always fading. God is dead, Moore tells us, as if we needed reminding, and we do, and all our spiritual seeking tells us that, if we are only brave enough to admit it. There is no wisdom, which is a kind of wisdom, but not a wisdom we can rely on. There is perhaps only poetry, only so long as it doesn't get maudlin or annoyingly sentimental. Tragedy is for those of a certain upper-level tax bracket, and comedy is for the poor who need to make laughter out of the worst possibilities. Moore's novel is neither tragedy nor comedy, though there is plenty (more than plenty) tragic in it (Amazon.com reviewers' constant complaints of this fact reveal American readers' impatience with unhappiness or loneliness in fiction, which is probably why not many people I know have read St. Kitts-born, British novelist Caryl Phillips, who piles on the tragedy much more heavily than Moore, and yet can't be accused of getting it wrong, in a global sense--check out A Distant Shore), and it is not a comedy, though there is plenty to laugh out loud about (every single sentence in this novel sings, which is perhaps a fault, though not much of one). It is neither comedy nor tragedy, or both, or some absurd hybrid. I am grateful for this novel, in spite of, because of, alongside of all of its beautiful failings.

A touching tribute to J.G. Ballard from his daughter Bea, who paints a portrait different from the persona his stories and novels present. As much as I've admired Ballard for his SF pop-surrealism (a major influence on me for his ability to combine the "low" culture of SF with "high" culture avant-garde cred), I was not aware he raised his daughters himself after his wife died. I admire him even more now. Is somebody going to get me his Complete Stories for Christmas, please?

I have three stories in the latest Action, Yes, which looks to be another great issue. I've only been able to glance at the contents so far, but it will be keeping me busy with reading over the next few weeks. This is consistently one of the best journals on the web for new writing.

A fabulous reading in the C. Walsh Theater at Suffolk University last night to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Graywolf Press. The day of celebration began earlier, though, with a conversation with press director Fiona McCrae, moderated by Cat Parnell. Fiona had some great things to say about the mission of the press to seek out and nurture unique voices that big publishing houses normally overlook (she asked us all to help her think of a good way of saying "commercially challenged"). It was also fascinating to hear about her experiences in the world of publishing (working on Ishiguro's Remains of the Day while a young editor in London), the editing process (she mentioned "nine-hour editing sessions" with a couple of the fiction writers at the reading), and the details of how she not only keeps a non-profit press afloat but also moves it forward.

The reading began at 7pm. Stephen Burt kicked things off with a lively reading of poems from his collection Parallel Play, as well as a stirring and very funny ode "To Subarus." Linda Gregg invoked the names of her teachers, Roberts Duncan and Creeley, as spiritual presences, and Raymond Carver also entered this space with a poem that Gregg remarked he liked, "And if you know anything about Ray you will understand why he liked it." (The poem is "Lies and Longing" in her new and selected, All of It Singing.) Askold Melnyczuk read the opening pages of his novel The House of Widows, which returns again and again to lies, news, betrayal, war, in a captivating first-person narrative. Friend and Suffolk colleague Fred Marchant read the beautiful "triptych" poem, "The Custody of the Eyes " from his latest collection, The Looking House. Salvatore Scibona offered us gorgeous, dense sentences from his novel The End, in a passage about the main character's encounter with the devil as ice-cream vendor at 1950s-era Niagara Falls. To bring the night to a close, Jeffrey Yang entranced the audience with the quiet cadences of poems from An Aquarium. A wonderful, wonderful event.

Karl Stevens visited my graphic novel course to talk about his art. My students and I had a vibrant discussion of his collection Whatever the class before his visit, and they asked many perceptive questions of him when he came to class. He spoke to us of his intensive crosshatching techniques, the kinds of materials he uses, how long it takes him to do a strip (and how long it takes him to do his watercolors and oil paintings, all in a similar photo-realist style); he also spoke to us of his love of the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt. Generous and personable, Karl even gave us all a demonstration of his working process by sitting at a table at the front of the classroom and inking part of his latest Failure strip. As I'll tell my students this week, when we see it in the paper, we'll be able to say, "He drew part of that in my class!" Thanks again, Karl.

Looking forward to this Sunday's reading at Outpost 186 in Cambridge at 3 pm. Matthew Derby, Kristen Iskandrian, and John Dermot Woods are reading as part of the Small Animal Project Reading Series. (John co-edits the journal Action, Yes which will have two short prose pieces of mine in the upcoming issue. He's got a new book out which I can't wait to see; check out his blog, too, which often has the latest on cutting-edge comics and graphic novels, as well as on other innovative/experimental fiction, art, etc.)

Robert Swartwood has a call up for an anthology of "Hint Fiction": fiction of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story. The deadline is the end of August.

My story "The Teacher" is in the July issue of Word Riot. You can also listen to my reading of the story by clicking on the audio link there. And you can download it to your iPod via Word Riot's monthly podcast subscription at FeedBurner.

Word Riot has just accepted my story "The Teacher." It will likely appear in July.