Since her 1985 collection, “Self-Help,” Lorrie Moore has been acclaimed as among America’s greatest short story writers, but with “I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home,” Moore returns to the novel for just the fourth time in the last 40 years.
Like her stories, the book is mordantly funny, such as a scene in which the character Finn and Lily, his dead ex-girlfriend (yes, you read that right), discuss possible tombstone epitaphs like, “WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” and “GOT NO EMOJIS FOR THIS” and “ATTENTION UNDERLYING CONDITIONS.”
As Moore’s sharply etched characters struggle to make sense of their world, readers may find themselves trying to make sense of Moore’s world with its shifting storylines. There’s the occasional bit of speculative 19th-century historical fiction with John Wilkes Booth as a boarder in a spinster’s home, an incident set well after the time he was killed.
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For 40-odd pages, Moore writes a realistic and devastatingly moving section where Finn, a high school teacher in the Midwest, comes to New York to visit his brother Max, who is in hospice and dying far too young.
Then the rest of the book is a surreal road trip, where Finn unhesitatingly abandons Max to help Lily. But she has committed suicide and so when Finn finds Lily, she’s hoping to bum a ride to a burial spot in another state. (She’s also, uh, decomposing.) All of this is taking place in 2016 in the weeks leading up to the presidential election.
“The book is about grief — about the country at large and for Finn — and it’s also about denial. And how you balance denial while also questioning the official narrative,” Moore said in a recent video interview.
Q. Max is dying. Lily has killed herself. Finn feels helpless in the face of all this and makes some dubious decisions.
We all try to help people in our lives who are suffering, and we often get it wrong. And certain kinds of suffering seem mysterious, which is what I wanted to show, how Lily’s suffering is mysterious to Finn. Suicidality and depression are kind of a black box; other people can’t really get it.
Once, for about 45 seconds, I felt so bleak and so dark, and I realized there are people who feel like this all the time and thought about how unbearable that would be. I have my own issues, but I don’t have that.
The title refers to people who are not home in the world or life or society or in this country. I thought of it as a sort of blues song title.
Q. Finn seems to be unmoored, which feels connected to his trouble at work where he’s teaching conspiracy theories to his high school students.
Finn is trying to reclaim the term “conspiracy theory,” to say that society pulls the trigger, not just one person. He is questioning the shorthand of official narratives on national stories and the official narrative of Lily – he doesn’t quite buy that she’s with this new guy or that she’s dead. And maybe there’s something to his questioning.
I was letting him occupy an ambiguous zone. He’s not a black-and-white thinker and these shades of grey are where the trip with Lily occurs. If people want to read this as Finn’s crackup and hallucination, I give him a car accident where he hits his head and some other signs that he’s a little destabilized, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. It could be that this is what happened to Finn. It’s just in keeping with his denial of any official narrative and his distrust.
Q. The storyline is bleak, but the writing is really funny. Lily says, “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life. They are the exit signs in a very dark room.” Do you consciously write funny to offset the sad or is that just the way real life is?
If you don’t include humor, you’re not telling the whole truth about life. Humor and suffering and loss often sit side by side. One of my favorite Shakespearean characters is Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet,” who says, “Ask for me tomorrow, you’ll find me a grave man.”
Q. This is a fast read with clever writing; do you try at certain points to slow the reader down so they think about the themes of loss and grieving?
I may just be very bad at pacing, but with a novel, you don’t know how fast a reader will go or where they’re going to stop and put it down and make dinner. You can construct a novel with beautiful chapters — Jane Austen is a classic example and Dickens, of course, was writing on an installment plan so he has terrifically shaped chapters — but today you have no idea and can’t control the reader. You can control the reader more with short stories, which are going to be read in a single sitting.
The novel can be anything in terms of structure and construction and pacing, which is why we have everything from “Ulysses” to “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Maybe I’ve just thrown up my hands with novels and said, “I’m just going to do this my own way.”
So the pacing has to be guessed at and people can get it wrong and I’m sure I do. There are times this book may seem to be spinning its wheels, but that I did do deliberately so you can feel that they’re trapped.
Q. Finn and Lilly are metaphorically spinning their wheels on their trip.
Yes, and their conversation is too. They’re trapped in this circle.
Q. And you don’t worry about the readers, right? I’ve seen you quoted as saying some books are just “confusing” and some need to be read twice. Was this on your mind while you were writing?
I didn’t show the book to anyone while I was writing because I knew it was weird. I didn’t want to have to report in and answer literal questions or have interference with the journey. I thought there would be some people who would understand and that’s who I was writing for.
I said to Jane Smiley, “I’m finishing this very weird novel and if I can get this past my agent and editor I do feel it will find some readers.” Jane said that’s exactly how I felt about “Perestroika in Paris” so I went and read it and thought, “Well, at least I don’t have a talking horse,” so maybe it’ll work out. A lot of people don’t understand it and that’s fine but it’s lovely and satisfying to me that some people do get it.
