“Death is the new life, he had started to think. And he hoped it would be cheaper.” A line that could be right out of a Lorrie Moore novel, because it is: the acclaimed American author is back with her first publication since 2014, returning to the fray with a meditative, irreverent treatise on life and death, a poignant and thought-provoking novel that lodges like a shard. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home may not be the easiest title to recall but the worlds created by Moore and the wisdom she imparts over the course of her narrative remain in the memory long after reading.
Finn is a suspended high school maths teacher and has come to New York to be with his dying brother, Max. Theirs is an easy relationship of camaraderie and love based on a shared history. In the sterile Bronx hospice Finn takes on the role of comedian, trying to entertain and distract his brother from what lies ahead. They shoot the breeze, reminisce about the past, watch the World Series together – “Finn could see Max was rooting for both teams. He was rooting for both teams to go on forever so he wouldn’t die” – but reality frequently breaks through: “I thought I’d beat it,” [Max] said hoarsely. “But death is a fucking genius.”
Readers familiar with Moore’s work will recognise even in this short summary her perennial themes, her impulse to set her fiction at the coalface of existence, her persistent questions: what does it all mean and how do we survive it? I Am Homeless investigates these questions in novel fashion. Accompanying the hospice storyline are two further stories, ghost stories to be more accurate. One revolves around Finn’s ex-girlfriend Lily, a children’s entertainer with suicidal tendencies; the other takes the form of a mysterious journal from the 19th century that turns out to be a series of letters from an innkeeper to her beloved sister.
The book opens with these letters, which makes for an evocative if slow beginning, before Moore shifts to the 21st century. The magic is in watching the threads come together, the nimble structuring and authoritative style that permit the reader to imagine the unimaginable, blurring the line between our world and the next in an impressive feat of storytelling that leaves us wondering, in the case of death and grief, who ends up more hollowed out, the dead or those they leave behind.
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Moore is the author of five story collections, three novels and a children’s book. Her 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. A recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story, she is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her new book shares characteristics with the novels of Miriam Toews, particularly All My Puny Sorrows. George Saunders’s short stories and his Booker-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo also come to mind.
The word “bardo” – the liminal space between death and rebirth in Buddhist culture – appears a number of times in I Am Homeless, which is fitting given the book’s concerns. Much of the novel charts a surreal road-trip that Finn takes with Lily, when he’s suddenly summoned home, away from his brother’s deathbed, to receive some shocking news. Difficult to discuss without plot spoilers, this narrative thread gives Moore the opportunity to interrogate what depression (“an exotic poisonous pet”) and suicidal ideation can do to both the person suffering from the illness and to their loved ones.
On Lily’s job as a clown entertainer we’re told: “She understood enfeebling malaise, having so often had her own. And she knew a booming laugh could startle it away.” The same can be said of Moore’s writing, her tragicomic style that embraces darkness and light, the conflicting impulses and experiences of being alive.
I Am Homeless is a haunting tale updated for the modern age. Moore’s ghosts are convincingly real, which is achieved not through narrative trickery but her precise and vibrant prose. A hospice: “Everywhere was the smell of alcohol pads, Pine-Sol, and the basil scent of old urine.” A woman drained of life: “There was a fading to her skin, the way a bee dead on a winter windowsill had no more yellow.” A relationship destroyed by depression: “She was wedded to eventual obliteration on every front. If she couldn’t win she would work hard to fail. The in-between places where real life occurred weren’t detectable on her radar. That too was the illness: the faulty radar.” Endlessly quotable, I Am Homeless is at heart a story about longing and belonging in a world where love is taking “the scenic route” towards an inevitable destination.
