The title of this book – See What Can Be Done – is not a boast but an instruction. I received it with almost every note I got from Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books. He would propose I consider writing about something – he usually just FedExed a book to my door – and then he would offer a polite enquiry as to my interest: perhaps I'd like to take a look at such and such. “See what can be done,” he'd invariably close. “My best, Bob.” It was a magical request, and it suggested that one might like to surprise oneself. Perhaps a door would open and you would step through it, though he would be the one to have put it there in the first place.
With See What Can Be Done, Lorrie Moore has assembled more than fifty previously published prose pieces; which involve not just book reviews, but overviews of several TV series (The Wire, Homeland, True Detective, etc), some in-the-moment political musings (from the Starr-Clinton-Lewinsky affair to the attempted recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker), and spanning from pieces written in 1983 to 2017, it represents the author's impressions of much of American cultural life (both high and low) throughout those years. In her short stories, I think that Lorrie Moore is imaginative and engaging, but in these critical essays, she's a little dull – they often follow a fixed formula (a long intro that gives a general impression of an author/director and his or her work, followed by an in-depth plot outline of what is specifically being reviewed), and not one of these pieces made me think, “Ooh, I should read or watch that”. There's value in collecting Moore's criticism in one place, but in the end, this is a bit of a slog to get through. (Usual caveat: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)
Literature, when it is occurring, is the correspondence of two agoraphobics. It is lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind. When biography intrudes upon this act between reader and author, it may do so in the smallest of vehicles – photographs, book jacket copy, rumors – parked quietly outside. In its more researched and critical form– the biography – it may nose into the house proper.I love that line (literature “is the correspondence of two agoraphobics”), and while I tend to agree with Moore that an author's biography isn't necessary to understand that author's work, I do like to read biographies anyway. Biographies reviewed here cover everyone from cultural phenomena, like Marilyn Monroe and JonBenét Ramsey, to literary heavyweights, such as John Cheever and Eudora Welty. In Moore's hands, these reviews simply outline (in detail) the facts contained in the books, and as she reveals little of her personal impressions of these books (she does not believe that the word “enjoy” has a place in book reviews), I found them all a little cold and dull. On the other hand, when reviewing fiction, Moore isn't shy about making broad pronouncements. On John Updike:
It is quite possible that by dint of both quality and quantity he is American literature's greatest short-story writer, and arguably our greatest writer without a single great novel.On Alice Munro (who has three short story collections reviewed here):
For the storyteller, the failure of love is irresistible in its drama, as is its brief, happy madness, its comforts and vain griefs. And no one has brought greater depth of concentration and notice to the subject than Munro. No one has saturated her work with such startling physical observation and psychological insight.Moore notes that as a Creative Writing professor, every year she teaches a new cohort of “brilliant university students” whose “desert island books” are invariably one of the Harry Potter series. And from this she has concluded that J. K. Rowling just may have written, with her focus on a battle between clearly defined forces of good and evil, the definitive book of 9/11 and its political and cultural fallout:
J. K. Rowling, showing up at her desk in the aftermath, feeling a generation's bolt-of-lightning scar, and imagining a long battle laced with fantasy, may have outwritten everyone.In particular, I found the writing about television series to be dull – Moore does a fine job of making connections to the larger culture, but she goes into far too much episode-by-episode depth for my liking (these pieces shouldn't be read by anyone afraid of spoilers). I was amused by Moore's evolution of thought on Hillary Clinton (which must be a common phenomenon for many American women who lived through these years): from not respecting Clinton's stand-by-her-man act in the 1990s, to Moore explaining why she could never vote for Clinton in 2008, to why she couldn't have voted for anyone else in 2016 (despite Moore herself, as a Midwesterner, having felt herself lumped in with Clinton's “basket of deplorables”).
I recently read Zadie Smith's Feel Free (another collection of essays by a leading cultural commentator), and I noted at the time that Smith's collection felt weakest in its book reviews; those pieces that were obviously written for an audience other than herself. See What Can Be Done suffers from the same problem – but unfortunately, it affects the entire collection by design; I can't say that I enjoyed it. It deserves more than two stars, but just barely.
