Post-Modernism and Zombies
This issue of the newsletter begins with a shout-out to Post-Modernism and to Lorrie Moore's new and very post-modern novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. Post-Modernism has now been with us almost as long as Modernism and that's a long time because we have now decided that the earliest Early Modernism goes back to Shakespeare. In fact, post-modernism has now been with us for so long, and we've gotten so relaxed in its presence, the New York Times reviewer of Moore's new novel doesn't even mention its exceeding post-modernity. Of course, if we want to talk about what's so post-modern about her novel, we need a definition of post-modernism. For the sake of simplicity and speed, let's just say that Post-Modernism is the reaction against Modernism. A post-modernist like Moore has little patience for the rules of Modernism and so she drops most of them and does what she wants.
But what are those rules she has dropped? The foremost rule adhered to by modernists refers to the people in the book. Here's the rule: These people are real. Meaning that the writer agrees to approach the people, places, and things in the book as people, places, and things that really exist. This means that the troubles are real and the disasters are real and the love and hate and grief and madness are also real. Which is why, when it's done right, we are moved to feel real emotion about the suffering and unfairness and struggles to overcome we are witnessing like it is all really happening.
But there's a problem with the rule, one that post-modernists figured out long ago. If the writer is limited to the Real, that's a limit to the imagination that leaves the writer somewhat stuck with empirical reality or the part of life we have proven exists. A writer like Moore wants to break free of that kind of writing in order to tell stories that can't be told while adhering to the rule. And she does so in this new novel by including zombies. Okay, she includes A zombie -- but it only takes one to totally ruin everything for the Modernists. And once one zombie is loose, there's no telling what may turn up next. Talking animals? There are no talking animals in Moore's book. What there is is a guy named Finn who has a brother named Max who is in hospice slowly dying - Finn is there with him and they are talking while Max dies. There are also some old letters Finn has found in what was once a 19th-century boarding house and they acquaint him, and us, with a parallel story of death and grief from long ago. There is also a former lover of Finn's named Lily who recently committed suicide. So far, in Modernist terms anyway, this is all kosher. In fact, it's more than, because Moore has included a trope that's been with the novel since the start: some old letters found in an attic. For hundreds of years now, so many novelists have lucked onto so many letters in so many attics, it's given rise to our vast industry which has produced at least a dozen generations of novelists, and counting.
But now we've come to the tricky place in Moore's novel. It's where Finn takes a drive past the cemetery where Lily is buried. It's where Lily somehow senses his presence from within her grave, reanimates herself and climbs her way out, in a rather grisly shape, and goes with him on a little road trip. So now it's On The Road with zombies. The modernists can only sigh as empirical reality vanishes in the rearview. "Why do the post-modernists do this to us?" a modernist can be heard to whine. "Why couldn't Lily be a real girl, pre-suicide? Is that so hard?" The answer's simple, of course. Moore wants to tell a story that can't be told unless Lily is already dead.
Naturally, part of the draw of such a story is that we'd really like to know a bit more about the afterlife. However, for empirical reasons, Lily simply can't be alive again and tooling around the country with Finn. She just can't. But Moore isn't bothered by that because she's about to perform the post-modernist's best trick. First, she's going to so drastically undercut Modernist storytelling tropes that they teeter on collapse, and then she's going to save her Jenga stack by restoring just enough craft technique that we are able to conditionally accept Lily's existence as a real talking, breathing dead woman (even though she can't possibly be one). Sound impossible? It often is, and it often fails, but in this case Finn's and Lily's road trip is the book's best part. They start to talk -- or argue -- in an engaging way about what they meant to each other when she was alive, the meaning of her death, and of death generally. Finn expresses his concern about how she's faring in her new form and Lily wisecracks in order to keep things light. At one point she asks to listen to Death Cab for Cutie. Meanwhile, Moore also wisecracks discreetly in the way that post-modernists do, always undercutting her seriousness with one hand while laying it on with the other: "Trees jutted bare branches into the sky in expressions of fright or surprise or warning or why choose." Post-modernists never seem to lose the awareness that stories are completely made up out of this flimsy stuff called language, and naturally, that becomes a major theme of what they write. At one point, Finn thinks about the saying on his favorite coffee mug: "EVERYTHING'S SORT OF BULLSHIT." In fact, this sentiment seems to be behind the disease -- clinical depression -- that killed Lily. Finn expresses this when he says: "I know you have never been able to find a through-line through the indifference of the universe." When post-modernism works, it seems to do so by picking situations so serious, they really can't be joked about enough.
Though Moore makes it plain that Finn and Lily are just representations, they are representations of people, people who were lovers, one of whom has killed herself and been granted a chance, on a car trip with Finn, to talk about some reasons why. Or maybe it's Finn who has been given a chance. Finn is angry at his brother's dying and at her for choosing death, but she says "We are surrounded by death so that we can be taught to accept it." Post-modern or not, comic or not, their encounter provides serious meditations on the question of "to be or not to be."
A movie I really like this time is called "Love, Charlie," a documentary about Charlie Trotter who, in his brief 54 years of life, became a great chef and transformed the industry by attaining the first 2-Star Michelin rating in North America for his Chicago restaurant.
For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.