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“Bark”

Ah, Door County in summer! Orchards and wildflowers, stone fences and birch trees, lakeshores and sunsets – strangers smiling and waving to one another. Welcome to the good life!

But those of us who are urban cynics at heart occasionally need to come up for a breath of smoggy air. If this is the case for you, dear reader, let me recommend an irreverent beach read: Lorrie Moore’s collection of short stories, Bark.

The characters in her tales will never be honored for their good citizenship, never considered as candidates for Ephraim’s next Fyr Bal Chieftain, or Olde Ellison Bay Days parade King and Queen. Moore’s people casually exploit one another and mindlessly let others take advantage of them. But they are engaging characters, nonetheless, mesmerizing in their unpredictability while at the same time reminiscent of people we have known.

But above all else, Moore is masterful in her use of language and delightful in her evocation of sardonic humor. This reader from time to time looked up from a page to bark out laughter at her wit. And as to the title, while dogs do appear in the stories (most of them metaphorical), the first piece in the collection, “Debarking,” offers a clue, as by turn characters seem either psychologically to unload or psychically to feel girded.

Consider Ira who works for the State Historical Society in a town that sounds suspiciously like Madison; six months after his divorce, he still couldn’t get his ring off his puffy finger. On the rebound he begins a romance with Zora, a pediatrician divorcee who is devoted to her sullen teenage son. “He had never been involved with the mentally ill before,” Moore writes, “but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.”

“Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs,” Moore begins her story Paper Losses, “now they wanted to kill each other.” As a last hurray in a failed marriage, Kit insists on accompanying her husband and children on a previously booked Caribbean vacation. What could go wrong?

While a happy couple may possess two hearts that beat as one, in the case of Dench and KC “the grumblings of their stomachs were intertwined and unassignable” in the story “Wings.” “’Was that you or was that me?’ she would ask in bed, and Dench would say, ‘I’m not sure.’” The couple’s plot to con a kindly elderly gentleman resolves in happily-ever-after poetic justice.

A hustling writer at a literary soiree (“You were a lobbiest for the pentagon,” was all he managed to say); the mother of a teen-age institutionalized son (For the third time in three years they talked in a frantic way about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son.); bikers who crash a wedding (“I didn’t really know motorcycles, but I knew that every biker from Platteville to Manitowoc owned a Harley.”); and a couple whose meeting in Paris is interrupted by a crisis of military intelligence (“We’re all suckers for a happy ending.”) populate her other intriguing stories.

A reader of my acquaintance finished the book in less than a day, and then remarked, “I didn’t care for it at all! I hated the characters!”

But entertainment takes many forms. One of them is delight in language used superbly well; another is the engaging complexity of dark humor; and maybe best of all is a panoply of original characters – certainly no one we’d want to invite for Thanksgiving dinner – but people we like to surreptitiously observe while waiting to board a plane or eating dessert in a restaurant.

Finish the quick read Bark and then you can return to living healthily, getting some moderate exercise, and appreciating unspoiled nature.

Readers of A Gate at the Stairs, Birds of America, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? will enjoy Bark but perhaps feel a sense of loss to learn that Lorrie Moore, formerly a long-time professor of creative writing at UW-Madison, is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.