Lorrie Moore explains, in her introduction, that her book’s title repeats the form of words used by Robert Silvers (1929-2017), editor of the New York Review of Books, along with books he hoped she might review. She was invariably able to see and do – and in unexpected ways, as this incisive, wide-ranging and enjoyable collection of reviews, autobiographical pieces and cultural commentary shows. “Enjoyable”, by the way, is a word on Moore’s adjectival hit list – banned, one presumes, for laziness or for being insufficiently explanatory (she does not explain).
She is an exacting writer but never a conceited one. She knows what it is to try and write fiction – or, rather, to succeed in writing it: her short stories are singular, witty and, at 61, her writing is as supple and original as when starting out. Someone once told her, on hearing that she was trying her hand at criticism, that there are six rules to writing reviews. She flinched, waiting to hear more, but the person did not, to her relief, elaborate. To this day, she does not know what the six rules were supposed to have been.
Working backwards, I have drawn up six rules that Moore would seem to be following, based on this book:
1. A review is a minor entertainment, a performance. Be courteous but not to the point where reviews are enforcedly joke-free zones. On Edna St Vincent Millay: “Millay was considered successfully detoxed when the nurses got her breakfast down to tea, toast and claret.” Yet remember: a joke should not distort the subject.
2. Be truthful and never gratuitously unkind.
3. Embed criticism within praise to reduce its sting. (Moore specialises in the critical sandwich: sharp filling, tasty bread on either side.) “It is one of [Joan] Silber’s limitations turned brazen, wise refusal that she has not bothered to create different voices for her characters. Everyone speaks in the same lively, funny, intelligent voice: the voice of the book.”
4. Keep ego in its place, but feel free to use the first person. Moore maintains: “There is nothing more autobiographical than a book review.” (An exaggeration, surely?) She writes about artists’ paradoxical mix of “weirdly paired egotism and humility”.
5. Choose quotes that deliver – Moore is a discerning magpie. (She quotes Eudora Welty writing to Virginia Woolf about The Lighthouse: “It was light under a door I shall never open again.”)
6. Consult your moral compass. Moore is an undoctrinaire feminist with a keen, flexible, unheated take on women. Her piece on Updike identifies an under-evolved knowledge of women by men in his fiction, a “wise unknowingness”.
She writes about writers, composers, musicians, film-makers, politicians. There are articles on John Cheever, Don DeLillo, Stephen Sondheim, Anaïs Nin, Jane Campion, Barack Obama and more. She never pushes – or sells. Even at her most engaged, her writing is slightly aloof. Yet she writes marvellously nuanced appreciations of short story supremos: Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and VS Pritchett. And she stirred my interest in previously unencountered writers: Peter Cameron, who “writes with a sort of perfection of restraint”; Claudia Roth Pierpont, whose Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World is “a wizard’s mix of innocence and fire”; and Clarice Lispector, the fascinating Brazilian writer who, at a French conference about her work, did not understand a word, walked out, went home and ate an entire chicken in frustration.
Moore gets off to collar-grabbing starts: “Bobbie Ann Mason writes the kind of fiction her own characters would never read.” She also knows a good ending. Her excellent piece on Eudora Welty finishes: “Literary biography is like detective fiction for those who don’t need suspense.”
She has, throughout, a polite mistrust of memoir and biography, a controversial belief in the superiority of fiction. The memoir is a second-class citizen because life calls the shots and imposes limitations.
Her political commentary is shrewd – her portrait of Hillary Clinton, in 2016, especially arresting. She compares her to the “ageing queen in Snow White”. She is an accomplished television reviewer – offering an admiring but undeceived piece about the HBO series The Wire. The producers used to refer to the series as “a novel”, and she makes the brilliant point that: “Not only does The Wire demonstrate the ingenuity of dealers and detectives as they elude each other, but surveillance itself becomes the show’s metaphor for what drama does in listening in on the world.” She writes well about Homeland, too, although she protests that the chemistry between Damian Lewis and Claire Danes is unconvincing – one of the few points upon which I disagree.
A book of this sort raises the question: who are reviews for? Should they be encouraged to hang around for posterity – preserved, perhaps, in the internet’s virtual amber? Or should there be mercy killings? On the whole, I feel that their life should not be prolonged.
But Lorrie Moore is such a writer that you want to collect her words as a gardener would rain in a water-butt. Though I would have liked more autobiographical pieces – her wry account of her indecisive road to a first marriage and her “I’ll-be damned cream-coloured suit” is great – enjoyable even. I was about to add that criticism is always the bridesmaid and never the bride, but, come to think of it, it is not a bridesmaid either. Moore is a lively guest at the party, but she never tries to steal the show.
• See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary by Lorrie Moore is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
