Bark : Stories

 

Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage. It was both the shame and the demise of them that hate like love could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shown a spotlight down for it to seize. Paper Losses

I'm the type of reader who likes to find a book's title within its pages and plumb it for deeper meaning. Lorrie Moore's Bark begins with excerpts from three poems: one that mentions a tree's bark, two about dogs (I used the images of the two alternate covers to reinforce this tree/dog ambiguity). And although there is no story within this collection with the title “Bark”, the word itself is used repeatedly: about dogs and trees; as a criticism about the way a person talks or laughs; to describe the protective cover of the brain; in the expression “sparky bark” as a nickname for weed. I suppose whether it's on a tree or brain, or issuing from a dog's muzzle, all barks are used protectively; and if there's one unifying idea the variety of characters in these stories are in need of, it's protection: from the harming world and from each other. I don't think there's one happy marriage in this collection (the narrator in Foes seems satisfied, but there are hints that his wife is less so), and while divorced parents are definitely bonded with their children, these relationships aren't necessarily healthy or enough. Moore constantly skirts the edge between tragedy and comedy – the laughs are darkly so – but while there was much that I admired in this collection, it didn't exactly wow me. Some highlights, nevertheless:

Debarking sees the narrator, Ira, starting to date again after his wife of fifteen years left him for another man. He muses:

It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings! – graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was.

After Ira has sex for the first time with a woman not his wife, she asks him, “Did you get off?” and that immediately reminded him of the time he was debarking a plane and stopped on the tarmac to tie his shoe and an airport employee had asked him that exact thing, “Did you get off?” So, “debarking” seems to be reinterpreted literally; as in to remove the protective layer of bark and open yourself up to another. (I fear, but don't actually think, that I'm reading too much into that because of my habit of looking for the embedded title. And can't decide if it's too deliberate.) To return to Paper Losses and a woman who doesn't realise that her husband is about to mail her divorce papers, even as they live together as a married couple:

It had been a year since Rafe had kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn't. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.

The Juniper Tree – replete with a variety of transplanted trees that fail to thrive in an unsuitable zone – is a mournful story involving the twilight years of those Baby Boomer women who have rejected traditional gender roles:

Every woman I knew here drank – daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another.

So, again, is that tree imagery too deliberate for the subject matter? Wings – a definite highlight until its corny ending – shows a middle-aged woman stuck (creatively, financially, romantically) with a man she can't quite unstick herself from:

She loved Dench. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn't preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice – and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors. No, women got it from other women, because in the end women would rather be rid of one another than have to endure themselves on a daily basis. So they urged each other into relationships. “He loves you! You can see it in his eyes!” they lied.

And I also really liked the last story, Thank You for Having Me; about a woman raising a daughter alone after her husband left (so many husbands/fathers leave in these stories; whether dying young or climbing out a restaurant's bathroom window):

Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

I understand that this collection came fifteen years after Moore's previously lauded Birds of America, so while Bark was released in 2014, I can sort of appreciate why so many of the stories here felt slightly anachronistic; rooted in the early 2000s. Not only is Ira worried about embarking on a new relationship at the dawn of the second Iraq War (which he compulsively follows on TV), but there is mention made of Ollie North losing his senate bid, an evil conservative at a fundraiser sneers about Obama's missing birth certificate and links to old hippy terrorists before the 2008 presidential election, and a CIA spook needs to leave a Parisian love nest in order to return to America and do damage control just as the Abu Ghraib scandal is hitting CNN. I can't decide whether these references make the collection feel already dated (in the today of 2017) or if it will stand as the perfect encapsulation of the times.

I picked up this collection because I had recently been delighted by Moore's short story How to Be an Other Woman, but unfortunately, nothing in Bark approaches that story's heft or humour. Other reviewers have noted that this collection doesn't seem to be up to Moore's usual standard, so I won't feel bad awarding it a middle-of-the-road three stars.