Face Time by Lorrie Moore, 2020
The magic trick:
Capturing the rawness of grief (and the early-pandemic COVID experience)
Oh, good, a COVID story. Just what I wanted.
This thing was written in the early days of the pandemic and published in September of 2020. So it’s definitely got that “ripped from the headlines” thing going on. That it manages to transcend its time is a testament to Moore as a writer.
At its core, this is a story about the death of her father. If the real man’s experience was anything like the character in this story – and I gather that it was – it’s just one of the true tragedies of COVID, when, pre-vaccine, people were dying in hospitals alone. In this story, the narrator can only talk to her ailing father over video call.
So there’s all that.
But this really pretty quickly stops being a “COVID story.” Yes, it was written while the whole thing was still new and terrifying, but I think what is far more important to the story is that it was written while the death of Moore’s father was still new and terrifying.
The predominant feature of this story, for me, is the feeling of confusion. Moore’s narrators and protagonists almost always have strong opinions, strong feelings. The stories are strong. They are told with a kind of definitive confidence of narrative.
This story is not like that. The attempts at the normal Lorrie Moore wit and humor are there, but they feel so half-hearted even the characters themselves comment in the story about the jokes. There is the usual Lorrie Moore anger and judgment of others, but it too feels muted, as if she’s going to that well for whatever buzz confident feelings provide only to find that it pales in comparison to the grief she’s experiencing.
In that way, this strikes me as perhaps the most personal story Moore has ever written. Her defense mechanisms – anger, irony, humor, and a master author’s total control of craft – aren’t enough to keep the reader from feeling the narrator’s baffled, frightened, lost, and confused pain.
And that’s quite a trick on Moore’s part.
The selection:
Delia, the baby, was beloved. Much more than Livvy or me. I was probably too mysterious to my father—no husband! no child!—for him to love me in more than an average way: a feeling he had in common with all the men I’d ever known. Still, like them, he seemed to enjoy talking to me. “What do you think of Biden?” he often asked. He was hoping to live until November, to cast his vote for the Democrats, and this was what he enjoyed talking about the most. As well as Brahms.
“Dad arranged to donate his body to the medical school,” I said now, changing the subject only slightly, “but they can’t possibly take it at this point. He would be like Typhoid Murray.”
“Now you have made me laugh,” Delia said, not laughing.
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