It is a sunny winter day in Nashville. Lorrie Moore (Glens Falls, New York, 63 years old) types on an old computer. He has a cup of coffee on the table, which he fills again and again. Or so it says. The table from which he responds to Babelia by email is "a classic messy desk, with books, papers and a small boat full of pens." Although his home is in Madison (Wisconsin) - where his son also lives -, as he teaches at Vanderbilt University, he spends part of the year in Nashville. From this city, the unstoppable rise of Bernie Sanders in the US Democratic primary follows. “I'm not good at predictions. But I think his success shows that he could have won Trump in 2016. The Democratic Party betrayed him then and I don't see why he can't do it now. In fact, it seems most likely, ”he says. Politics in the United States, he adds, is increasingly "like an endless television series that viewers are paying."
His first book, Self Help (1985) was a collection of stories. Then three others would arrive, including Birds of America (1998), an ode to mismatch and disappointment in all its painful and, at times, absurd variants. She is also the author of three novels, and one of them, At the bottom of the stairs (2009), was about to take the PEN / Faulkner and Orange. In these 35 years Moore has not limited himself to dismantling the American dream from fiction, with a wild and bittersweet youthful fury, but he has also stopped to analyze the work of his contemporaries - not only, but above all, writers - to confess the occasional personal adventures - such as the one that almost ended up with her newly married on television, illustrating an informative piece about social aids - and throwing sharp darts against everything she did not like; for example, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and the movie Titanic .
Moore admits that he was aware that "criticism is a form of autobiography" when he prepared to compile the texts resulting from his acute observations on request. She realized then that her life as a writer had two "traces", that of fiction and that of non-fiction, finally gathered in the newly published volume Let's see what can be done , and that this second trace said so much of herself Same as your fiction. After all, he is confessing even his passion for John Hughes tapes. “Writers are lucky. You cannot dance a review of a dance play, but a writer can write a review of a novel, and so the conversation is not in the hands of people who do not practice the art in question, ”he says.
"Would you say it is useful for a creator to observe someone else's work so closely?"
-"Definitely. You learn Sometimes technique. Others, to be brave and take risks. ”
"Are writers' criticisms more benevolent?"
- "What I think is that his criticisms are better, or more valid, than those of those who do not engage in this, because we can have a clearer vision, for better and worse, of what the writer was trying to do" .
She has reviewed, abundantly, the work of Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Philip Roth or John Cheever, who are some of her favorite authors, whom she best understands. If you could choose, who would you send one of your books to review? “I wouldn't want to bother anyone for something like that. Shakespeare? He would have been very busy, and now he is very dead, ”he jokes.
At the time she began writing criticism, the critic was always a man. Now, when critical voices have ceased to be mostly, at least in the United States, straight white men, things are changing. That is, the canon is changing. “It is true, there is greater diversity than ever, not only in what is published, but in what is considered really good, which means that we have a broader idea of what it means to be human, and that the great novel already it is not dictated by men and their classic themes, ”he considers. At a time when technology threatens generational coexistence - "young and old we look at each other asking for explanations" -, fiction has also become, more than ever, "a refuge from chaos, a refuge for our need for mystery in a world without mysteries, ”he says. Why? "Because fiction is the place where mystery goes when it needs to be reorganized."
Let's see what can be done
Author: Lorrie Moore.
Translator: Cecilia Pavón.
Editorial: Eterna Cadencia, 2019.
Format: 512 pages.
Get the book at your nearest bookstore