War and Moore
Halfway through "Debarking," a short story by Lorrie Moore published two weeks ago in the New Yorker, the main character, Ira, finds himself driving in the rain through an intersection where "half a dozen young people in hooded yellow slickers" are holding "Honk for Peace" signs. Ira and the other cars decelerate, and for the change of two lights everyone leans into their horns. It's described as "something like a gorgeous moment," all these drivers "honking like geese in a wild chorus of futility."
A wild chorus of futility: not an inaccurate depiction of what fiction can contribute to solving the world's political problems. That isn't the place of fiction. But in a world charged and charred by the deleterious effects of war, it's worth wondering why there isn't more fiction grappling with the ways that life--the way living--continues to change.
Probably one reason there aren't more stories explicitly engaging the heavy trappings of international conflict is simply that that kind of fiction is so difficult to pull off; it's difficult to avoid didacticism or sentimentality or agenda, positioning the characters of a story in such a manner as to be essentially pieces in a political statement, rather than essentially characters. (Whatever last year's Poets Against the War anthology contained, it wasn't poetry.) The achievement of Moore's story is that she successfully, almost effortlessly, and yet significantly, incorporates the messy dread of current events--terrorism, homeland security, Iraq--into the frame of a story about an unremarkable, overweight divorcé courting a lovely (if lunatic) pediatrician. The concurrent international turmoil presses itself into the thoughts and light conversations and physical experiences of the characters' lives in funny, ordinary, horribly natural ways.
Even the characters' imaginations have been, in a way, invaded: Having sex with a relative stranger for the first time in a long while, Ira takes his glasses off and the woman before him suddenly is "a blur of dim and shifting shapes and might as well have been Dick Cheney or Lon Chaney or the Blob." In one scene, contemplating the landscape of his front yard, Ira decides that "the chemical weapons of terrorism aimed at the heartland might prove effective in weeding the garden," and he tells a neighbor, "'This might be the sort of war I could really use!'"
"Debarking" is not a story of larger revelations (although a few of its small revelations are priceless: "life was long and not that edifying"), but a story about the ways in which the burden of the world can distort a person's mind. The vocabulary of war rewrites Ira's memories (looking back on being served his divorce papers: "there was shock and awe for you"), and his idle thoughts seem to be, in both the passive and violent sense, occupied. "[Ira] lay in bed at night, the moments before sleep a kind of stark acquaintance with death. What had happened to the world? It was mid-March now, but it still did not look like spring, especially with the plastic sheeting duct-taped to his windows. When he tried to look out, the trees seemed to be pasted onto the waxy dinge of a still wintry sky. He wished that this month shared its name with a less military verb. Why March?"
