COLLECTED STORIES by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore, for whom I had hope, disappoints me with the first half-dozen of her COLLECTED STORIES, a hefty, great-looking Everyman's Library volume that deserves better contents. The stories are alphabetically arranged, so the first six form a mini-retrospective of her career, and from this I judge her to be an above-average 'program writer'. Her prose is surprisingly good, her voice sometimes flashes a caustic humor, but her work doesn't approach greatness. These aren't stories on a level with Munro or Proulx or Carver. There's nothing shockingly new or wow-inducing in Moore's work, no revelations. She composes the sort of entertaining, work(wo)manlike stories typical of MFA program professors (we can even fairly classify her as an 'academic writer' a la David Lodge); and like most capos of the MFA mafia, she's handicapped by the 'write what you know' dogma. Like her professorial contemporary George Saunders, she's too traditional for her own good (Saunders' overpraised oeuvre consists mostly of warmed-over Donald Barthelme, and his stories' irrealistic surfaces serve to advance an underlying, and ultimately conservative, sentimental humanism.), and like her fellow prof Richard Ford, her reputation has likely been artificially inflated by her institutional affiliation. She's worshiped by former students (like the one whose hagiographic introduction dubiously graces this collection), but I can't find the knockout greatness in the work. What I did, repeatedly, find was a tendency to end her stories with unearned epiphanies. Instead of putting in the hard imaginative work required to bring a complex story to a satisfactory conclusion, she simply pulls an arbitrary epiphany out of her buttcrack and calls it an ending. Lorrie Moore leaves my mind unblown. What Gore Vidal grandly called "the matter of America" deserves a better teller.