Thursday, 6 September 2018

Something for Everyone


What do you want? I ask him in the dining room. They all said about his mother, the Irish whiskey heiress, traipsing from bank to bank, raising the money. They said her dresses and her red hair. (Marconi)

I've stated before that Lisa Moore simply speaks my language – from her intriguing turns of phrase to her kaleidoscopic storytelling – so I was ecstatic to pick up her new book of short stories; probably ended up reading them too fast. Like her other collections, Something for Everyone has frequent moments of brilliance and emotional punch, and like with my other reviews, I find it near impossible to excerpt bits that demonstrate what I mean by that (rereading my reviews of her other collections, I can see what my quotes were meant to capture, but they fall a bit flat out of context). I expect this review to also fail to describe what I love about Moore's writing, but here I go again.

The first story, A Beautiful Flare, was probably my favourite (and was first published in The Walrus as “The Shoe Emporium”, were anyone inclined to read it for themselves), and it mashes together the stories of three coworkers at a shoe store. Every line was intriguing to me, each character equally fascinating, and as Moore slices and splices so seamlessly between the three, I knew that no excerpt could possibly give a flavour of the whole. Here's my attempt:
The hole in her nylons that Marty has torn has a creep, it creeps, widening in an oval big as the palm of her hand, peeling back or unravelling, a gazillion filaments, small and laddering down the leg, invisibly giving, breaking, no, not breaking exactly, more evaporating and it is her desire, a spreading, licking, a hole in the nylons because even though she comes to work put together because what are these stockings but a petroleum product made as thin as a lick of light, tickling, so that her skin pudges through, like dough rising or anything that rises, and then the keystone shoebox is knocked maybe half an inch with each – let’s take a moment to acknowledge the paradox – very gentle, controlled but forceful, holy thrust/bang, tinged with maybe a little love for her, however ephemeral, so that the tightly jammed shoebox, maybe twelve shoeboxes above her head, juts itself out of the tightly packed wall of shoeboxes that rises from floor to ceiling all the way down the very narrow storage closet, and keeps jutting farther and farther with each lovemaking rock of Marty’s hips and buttock contraction and the tilt of his head, bent as if in prayer, but also, pouf, blowing a mouthful of her hair away from his lips because, he stops just for a sec, because a hair, one of her hairs, seems to have gotten into his mouth and they’re both caught up in the micro-work of what is it? A hair? Phwah-phwah, he’s trying to get it off his tongue, and there he has it, have you got it? Pinched between finger and thumb and saliva shine, he rubs it away, and the engorging freckled dong deep inside, now, slow at first but deliberately slow, sea cucumber slow, in the deep cold is what they have down there, holes in the bottom of the ocean where everything is eyeless, groping but sentient, and phosphorescent and just as if they were not in the mall, as if the blow-out sale were not in progress, as if you couldn’t buy one, get the second pair half-price, as if Steve would not be in here any second to get a load of shoes, slowly and at the same time, warp speed, she is kissing his white eyelids.
As that demonstrates, many of the stories are about relationships, and while Moore can be graphic (but somehow not lewd) about sex, she can also be very funny:
What he'd said when he met Trisha's girlfriend: I'm available when you gals want to take it to the next level. He'd made fists low, near his waist, and wrenched them back and forth while jutting his hips, twice to the left, twice to the right, mock-wincing with each, you know it, anus pulse, and repeating, Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then a few lines of Loverboy's “Turn Me Loose”. (The Fjord of Eternity)
(I don't know why Moore had to describe that as an “anus pulse”, but it made me snort; it takes the boor down a peg.) Another favourite story was The Viper's Revenge, and it perfectly demonstrates how Moore can come at a subject sideways; the gut punch you don't see coming. It begins as the story of a librarian from St. John's who travels to Orlando for a conference, and once she notices the Caretaker cleaning her hotel's pool, we get a look inside his head as well as he thinks about his wife and children and the happy – if impoverished – life they've led. As the librarian hooks up with a local musician, we see the Caretaker's family life; consider that although both parents work, they still rely on the wife's brother to pay half their two room apartment's rent to sleep on the couch while getting his PhD; but the laughs and love and tight relationships make the close quarters look enviable. Before we realise that this is actually a story about the mass killings at the Pulse nightclub, we see the Caretaker and his wife talking to a surgeon about a vasectomy (which, although impossible for me to describe why, feels like the essence of the story; maybe because it's the only interaction we witness between the privileged and the underclass of the happiest place on earth?):
Back during the pre-op consultation the doctor had slouched in his chair, not even unslouching while he sketched on a pad and then sent the pad spinning over the desk to the Caretaker. The doctor's head cranked to the side on his shoulder, his jaw jacked up by a blue-veined fist, his elbow resting on the plastic arm of the office chair, his legs yanking the swivel chair side to side with a two-toned squeak, until the square jaw nudged off the knuckles and the doctor was lifted from the haze of his lassitude, blinking as if to assert his presence back in the room, the Caretaker lost in the ballpoint illustration, the testicles and the tubes going to the testicles and where the cut happens, a slash dug into the paper with such force it punctured the surface of the pad with a tiny hole, which, the doctor swore it was a foolproof procedure.
Moore always captures these fine details about folks – and if it doesn't read as fascinating, I'll accept the fault as mine for excerpting out of context. In this collection she writes about average people in Newfoundland, and also Marconi's famous attempt to send the first transatlantic radio message from St. John's Signal Hill (told, intriguingly, from the POV of a hotel waitress), and a story from Santa Claus on Christmas Eve (incidentally explaining the quantum mechanics behind his work). Frequent repetitions – ATVs, Gyproc, and BIC pens; sex workers, separation, and syringes; St. John's, Fort Mac, and Iceland – throughout the stories tell us the kind of things on Moore's mind, and always, she has something interesting and important to say about how people live. This is what I like and I'll happily await whatever Moore comes out with next.


The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude
Patrick DeWitt: French Exit
Esi Edugyan: Washington Black
Sheila Heti: Motherhood
Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs
Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth
Kim Thúy: Vi
Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)
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