Bark (2014) is an anthology of short stories by American author Lorrie Moore. Set in the present day, all eight of the stories deal with the distinct challenges that people face as they age and are forced to reckon with modernity’s ever more rapid technological and social change. A genre-defying work, the short stories contain elements of comedy and tragedy, resemble both fiction and nonfiction literature, and cover a broad array of themes, including aging, the fragility of relationships, the instability of identity, disappointment, grief, social irony, and alienation. The book’s introductory story, “Debarking,” opens as a recently divorced man, Ira Milkens, looks on with grief as the United States announces its imminent invasion of Iraq. While dealing emotionally with the specter of war, he tries desperately to rekindle his dating life. He goes on a date with Zora, a mentally unstable woman; however, blinded by his desperation and loneliness, he does not see that she is not well. By the end of the story, it is unclear whether Ira will surmount his loneliness. The second story, “The Juniper Tree,” is told by a woman who regrets not seeing her friend, Robin, before she died an early death. She and some of Robin’s other friends commemorate her by organizing a toast to her memory. “Paper Losses” concerns two aging, married hippies who grapple with disillusionment as they realize they have held too tightly onto an idealization of the past. As they contemplate divorce, they start to process and accept that they will look and feel different as they age, and also that they will relate differently to their memories over time. An aging liberal white man meets a young, attractive, and conservative Asian-American woman in the story “Foes.” The encounter challenges his preconceptions of who a conservative can be. Ultimately, his wife encourages him to be more receptive to encounters with people from different walks of life. In “Wings,” a poor musician exploits a lonely old man in order to inherit his fortune and home. While working on this plot, the musician leaves her boyfriend, who, ironically, had been exploiting her meager income for years. A woman braces herself for her mentally ill son to come home from a long-term inpatient clinic in “Referential.” This change brings an end to her relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Pete, as both realize she is far more loyal to her son than to him. The penultimate story, “Subject to Search,” follows Tom who is on a romantic getaway in France. His trip is interrupted by orders to return to America to work on the Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse scandal. Tom realizes that many of the soldiers who committed human rights violations were too young to be soldiers at all and that their actions were partly due to the death and suffering they saw around them. The collection’s final story, “Thank You for Having Me,” takes place at the wedding of the former babysitter of the narrator’s daughter. The wedding is crashed by a gang of bikers, who, quickly realizing that they mistook it for a different person’s wedding, apologize. After their heartfelt display of remorse, the narrator recognizes that though past mistakes cannot be reversed, the present cannot be spent grieving them.

Overview

Lorrie Moore

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