I Didn't Like It Because It Felt Bad
I Didn't Like It Because It Felt Bad
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore + a rant on the critic's "responsibility" to be "objective"
It was bound to happen soon enough! No one has a truly perfect record—not even me, dear reader. This month, Kathryn and I picked a book for the pod that we…didn’t love. Ugh! I hate to even say it, but it’s the honest truth. Despite this unfortunate misstep, I think we still had a fun discussion. Yes, we revealed the entire plot and outcome of this novel. And, yes, I ended up a bit more off the cuff than I intended, which resulted in a less even-keeled evaluation of the merits (and shortcomings) of this I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home than I probably would have liked.
But you know what!? It’s OKAY. I’m human, I’m funny, I like to speak in absolutes and verbalize my feelings. So that’s what I did, and that’s what you’ll get this month. Both in the pod and in this little writeup, made specially for you.
I wanted to touch on a few things that I said in the episode—to clarify and expand upon the points that I felt needed it as I (torturously) listened back for editing purposes. Let he who doesn’t say um between every sentence cast the first stone.
I’d listen to the episode first (don’t worry I cut out most of the um’s) if you want the below to make any sense to you. Here it is on Spotify, here it is on Apple Podcasts. Again, there are spoilers in the episode and the below, so continue at your own risk!
Okay, now, FIRST:
Kathryn and I brushed over a discussion of whether Lily’s zombification and reappearance in Finn’s life is a delusion or a reality. I think this question is worth a moment more than we gave it. Kathryn said that she read it as a delusion, and I said that for me, it was a reality. By that I meant that I took it to be a literal occurrence within fictional framework that Moore is creating.
To view Lily’s corporeal reanimation, the road trip Finn and Lily take together, AND the actions/words of gas station attendants and inn keepers who can clearly see Lily as all part and parcel of Finn’s delusion is the more literal reading of the text.
What Moore is trying to communicate to the reader (I think) is that grief makes people crazy. The dead never really die. We hold on. We try to make things make sense when they don’t make sense, and the results are often a bit…wonky. Like carrying around, even temporarily, a decaying corpse. When someone you love dies, it’s like the rules of the universe, that you always thought were set in stone, suddenly wash away—they were just words scratched into the sand with a stick someone found on the beach. If the rules aren’t the rules—if something that was here one moment can just be gone the next moment—then why not a zombie?!?!
All of that is communicated even if you read Lily’s presence as pure delusion. Finn is the grieving, wild-minded man. Anyone can feasibly understand and imagine (without rewriting their rules of reality) that a man in his position might go insane. But I think something more is achieved when you read it all as literal—again, obviously within the framework of the story. Re-write your rules of reality! If you as a reader choose to believe that Lily has come half back to life and is now a conscious participant in a morbid roadtrip with Finn, plainly visible to anyone who comes across the duo, you can experience Moore’s argument on a logical level and an emotional one.
By making Lily’s post-life existence really real, the grief is transformed from an imaginary thing in the head of one man into a very real physical thing, visible and tangible. Witness this! I love this corpse! Even if I’m trying to pretend that she’s not a corpse, just a very sick and pale lady.
This is what I meant when I said that Moore almost had me in the third quarter. I fell headlong into the dialogue between Finn and Lily. All the other elements of the novel fell away—I forgot about them, just as I believe that Moore wanted me to. All that was left was this two-person play of grief made physically manifest. I wanted to know how the play would end. I hoped it would end well.
But this is the SECOND thing:
It didn’t. I don't think that Moore presented a suitable vision of how we can all walk around with our corpses, loving them. And this might be a me problem! Maybe I wanted something from Moore that she wasn’t willing to give. Maybe I wanted something that she didn’t think she should have to give. I was hoping that she would present a vision of pain and ecstasy, sorrow and joy, in such a way that the ecstasy begets the pain begets the ecstasy and the joy begets the sorrow begets the joy. À la Zero at the Bone, a deeply painful, deeply joyful book.
Instead, what Moore provided was a man bumbling. No answers. Just some lukewarm version of hope without any teeth. Hope may be the thing with feathers, but it also has teeth!!!!! Consider:
“He saw that no longer caring about a thing was key to both living and dying. So was caring about a thing.”
“He would become happy to die. He would also become happy to live. In this way he would never be unhappy again.”
“All yearning and crying out in the dark he had now swept away in order to continue through each day as a stone.”
All these are quotes from the last couple pages of the book. I’ve left the one out where he contemplates killing himself too—or “hurrying up” to the other side, where everyone he loves already is.
Maybe Finn represents a more realistic (read depressing) vision of the modern grieving life than what I imagine to be possible, and therefore was looking for at the end of this novel. Or, it might just be the only grieving life that’s available to you when you don’t believe in God (or some other higher power—the “other gods to investigate” as Moore puts it). Maybe that’s the key difference between fictional character Finn, destroyed by grief, and real-life Christian Wiman seeped in agony, but ecstatic nonetheless. One does not have faith beyond the corporeal and the other does. This only just occurred to me now, so it’s a half-baked idea, but I think it’s important!!!!!
THIRD:
This book is packed essentially to the brim not only with the detailed discussion of one woman’s desire for death, and detailed descriptions of the methods she tries to die with/ultimately succeeds at dying with, but also with her reanimated corpse’s very limited consideration of whether death was the right choice. In fact, the corpse mostly thinks it was the right choice. She’s a continuation of the woman, who desperately wanted to die, so no surprise there.
I don’t think I/we emphasized enough that it’s not just suicide, it’s suicide ideation, and I’m just not remotely interested in that.
I’ve read a few pieces centered on literary criticism recently that ponder the critic’s responsibility to separate out his/her personal whimsies and biases from whether or not a book is good anyway through being “successful at doing what it set out to do.” I suppose criticism is what I’m engaged in, so I think about this responsibility or lack thereof as it applies to me.
I agree that attempting to consider a text objectively can be an interesting exercise. However, I put “successful at doing what it set out to do” in quotes above because what does that honestly even mean? Who am I to say what any given text really “set out to do?” Other than what all texts must do: satisfy their reader, even if that satisfaction comes in an untraditional from. As I highlighted on the podcast, I can see the merits of Lorrie Moore’s writing—her words, her craft—and did derive some satisfaction from that, even though on an overall basis I didn’t care for this book. I suppose I can guess that one of the things Moore set out to do was write well.
Besides that, interesting exercise or no, ART is NOT objective, and I personally prefer a strong & opinionated review that I don’t agree with1 to one that flip flops about and this-was-good, that-was-good’s its way out of its own FELT reading experience. We can talk about form & craft & authorial intention &&& to the moon and back, but good art makes you FEEL, and those feelings are a valid part of criticism. I liked this because it felt good is a full sentence. As is I didn’t like this because it felt bad.
I believe that you, my dear readers of this weekly missive, are intelligent people, and I refuse to presume that you’re not intelligent enough to know that when I say I don’t like a book, it’s my own damn personal opinion. I have no credentials, just my own taste.
I might be in a feisty mood!!! But I think the hand holding goes too far sometimes. I want you to be here reading my writing and reviews because you enjoy THIS critic’s SUBJECTIVE opinions—whether it’s on the books I read, or the food I eat, or the clouds I see, or whatever else. Is it really my responsibility to ensure that my every opinion is caveated with objectivity? Especially if I operate under the belief that I’m writing to an intelligent audience???? Why does every real take need to be qualified with its equal and opposite? To prove that I’m capable of weighing both sides? The hemming and hawing that often results from that type of approach is not that fun to read, and it’s definitely not fun to write.
If you trust me (my opinions), that’s cool as hell. If not—if you want to find out if you’d like this book for yourself (or, if you’re actually intrigued by what I’ve said about it) I respect that too. Read it!!!! As I hope/trust is apparent, I don’t claim that it’s entirely without merit.
Aside from completely spoiling/ripping I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, this episode of the pod also includes, as per usual, a spattering of other A+++ book & reading recommendations.
I also was shocked to find out yesterday, upon asking the good booksellers at Three Lives for a copy of Creation Lake, that it does not in fact come out until September. Which means that it won’t do for our August read. Sorry for the bait and switch. Instead, much to my DELIGHT, I talked Kathryn into reading Age of Innocence. Get your copy here w/ a foreword by Elif Batuman or here with a forward by Colm Tóbín and a cover that doesn't offend my sensibilities, and read with us.
I hope you enjoy the ep. Kisses!
Like this one! In the Sewanee Review that helped me see the novel in a different light (though it didn’t change my mind).