On Lorrie Moore's Anagrams

"Life is sad. Here is someone." 

If I were to talk about my experience while reading Lorrie Moore's strange, poetic, chaotic, funny and heart rending book "Anagrams" it would be of how I suffered with it's seemingly mashed-up stories containing only 3 or 4 characters that have either real or imaginary connections with each other. The story between Benna Carpenter and Gerard Maines just wouldn't stop shifting in every chapter. One time she is a nightclub singer and he an aerobics instructor to pre-schoolers, then on the next she is an assistant to him who is an art history graduate student, she was also mentioned as a teacher of poetry and he a pianist aspiring to be an opera singer. There was also a mention of a daughter "Giorgianne", a thought up child, like an invented life amidst broken loves, deceased relations and just basically the things that failed and refused her an ounce of happiness. After reading about this daughter whom she doted on, imagine my frustration when alas! she owes up to her nonbeing "Sometimes," she sighs into the stream, "I feel like I'm right in the mist of things". It is all a muddle of stories, abstract in a sense, where you won't know if the people (aside from Benna and Gerard) or things existed or happened in a real-life aspect or just a figment of Benna's seemingly deprived life. It was such a struggle that despite having admitted a "Moore" fan myself, I had to put it down and thought of picking it up after exactly 5 months, right about that time when I finally have nothing else to read. But I found myself absorbed into her little chaos of the heart and mind, still. This book, though hard to digest and follow through it's jumbled narratives (a mere flaw or an overfeed of Moore's literary gifted-ness, perhaps?)  renders each characters, despite their loneliness and unhappiness and their constant plight to survive every faulty turn, with bursting poetic qualities. A certain elevated way of writing is something I've always admired of Lorrie Moore. It held a charm of its own. Anagrams is a profound piece of work wrought with puns, never at a loss for wit and needling honesty, a straight blow to ones guts where it will stay for good, or at least the spirit of her work. This may not be the best work of fiction by her that I have read but it does not fall short of a masterful craft that made Birds of America, Self-Help, Like Life a worthwhile read. 

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 "I missed him. Love, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that." 

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“I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. ”

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 "Our laughs grow louder and hazy. Soon we are kissing. Soon we are unbuttoning. I haven't kissed or unbuttoned in a long time and it's like, at long last, a meeting of friends, falling into a familiar, ineffable dance we've both learned elsewhere, long ago, but have revived here, a revival! 

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"And soon we are upstairs, pulling down the bedspread, something in us pounding and accomodated, a mashing of hips, a pressing of faces, a slow friction of limbs and chests and lips against the sheets, this argument that is sex. Sometimes his chest moves up from mine with a soft sucking sound from the damp, trapped space between our sternums-- something wet and reluctant, like marine life or a heart that can't stop beating no matter how it tries. We are gasping, quiet, in the dark, and then the wash of violet and night tornadoes through my legs and up behind my eyes, plumbs and spirals my spine, and I know if I can keep feeling like this I'll be okay, if I can feel like this I'm not dead, I won't die. Life is sad. Here is someone. 

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“All the world's a stage we're going through.” 
Anagrams, Lorrie Moore