Lisa Moore (1) (1964–)

Teenagers are the worst. They’re lit by furnace hot hormones. They have the energy to do everything at once all the time. And they do it. And every bit of their childhood and upbringing is swirling around in them getting set to lock them in as the people they will (perhaps) always be. Fortunately, Flannery Malone has never suffered a dint, a lessening of any kind, in the love her nutty, artistic mom, Miranda has for her. Even her little brother, Felix, loves her, in his way. And her best show more friend, Amber. Well, Amber is going through her own changes. And it doesn’t look as though forever will end up characterizing their best friendship.

Lisa Moore presents Flannery in all her exuberant fluency and anxious present. She is a marvellous character who totally earns the first-person focus throughout. Flannery’s high school may be exceptional in being so full of “characters”. Or maybe I just went to a boring high school (or was too bored to notice). And into that mix of exceptionality comes the ever-present problem of love. It’s driving people together and driving others apart. It’s the gimmick in Flannery’s project for her Entrepreneurial class: selling love potions. And it’s the one thing Flannery doesn’t get at all, and not just because her mother can’t afford to buy her grade 12 biology textbook. But love will find a way (and other clichés, as appropriate).

Your heart will go out to Flannery. How you can help it? Clearly Lisa Moore is using some kind of love potion. Or just beautiful writing.

Recommended. show less

Grief changes everything. For Helen, whose husband, Cal, died in the Ocean Ranger oilrig disaster in 1982, grief suffuses her life. Everything she does, her children, including the one on the way at the time of Cal’s death, her work, her connections (or lack thereof) with others, all of it is enveloped in grief. But it’s more than that, because grief changes even what has gone before. It tinges the memory of her time together with Cal with foreboding and a previously unrealized sadness. show more It gets in all the cracks; it is in the very air Helen breathes. And it isn’t just Helen. The loss of their father affects each of her children, though perhaps her son, John, is most palpably affected. At one point, a seer grips his arm and states ominously, “You’ve lost someone in the past,” continuing a moment later to complete the vision, “Or you are going to lose someone in the future.” Well, yes, that about covers it.

Lisa Moore’s style is distinctive and well practiced. Those familiar with her short story collections, Open or Degrees of Nakedness, will find the same fractured and faceted narrative structure here. There the glimpses she provides, mirrored by her fragmented and suggestive sentences, work brilliantly to create a mood and imply a whole life, a whole story. Whether such a style is as suitable for a novel is debatable, though it certainly works well enough for her first novel, Alligator. Here, however, everything seems muted, monotone, a bit depressed. That works well, of course, with the overall presentation of grief. But it does tend towards a single note. Sections with different characters as leads all sound the same and the characters begin to bleed into one another.

If grief changes everything and everything is grief, then sooner or later the reader, and one suspects also the characters, will start discounting. We start looking past the grief just as we look through the air to see the things that stand out. And what stands out here are the ties of family, the bonds of love, the blunders we make and how we rectify them, and the in-built drive to create new life and new love. Grief may be everywhere, but we get through it. Recommended. show less

My lord, can she write! Lisa Moore that is. She grips me by the scruff of my neck and heaves me about. Such is the power of her writing. That said, I don't like her stories all that much. There is more to reading than liking something. And she has shown that to me clearly, and earned my respect for her craft, her gift. Brilliance, in a word. Read it.

Lisa Moore’s short fiction collection, Something for Everyone, is nothing less than a virtuoso performance, a grouping of incisive modern-day tales that propels the reader through a splintered, emotionally simmering, non-linear reality that is always surprising and often shocking. Moore plays with structure, chronology and perspective in ways that few writers dare (at the moment, only George Saunders comes to mind), darting back and forth in time, piling abrupt transitions on show more conversational non-sequiturs on slippery shifts in construction. Is she daring her reader to follow along, or give up, at their peril? But anyone who does give up is missing out on what a truly gifted and original storyteller working at peak form has to offer. Moore’s stories are not only structurally ground-breaking but geographically and socially adventurous as well, observing few if any boundaries. Her characters include professionals, mothers and fathers, teens, criminals and sex workers; her chief setting is Newfoundland, but several stories range farther afield. The opener, “A Beautiful Flare” explores the working dynamic among employees of a shoe store with a sales award on the line. “The Fjord of Eternity” follows Trisha’s search for an insurance-claim fraudster. The tragic backdrop of “The Viper’s Revenge” is the Pulse nightclub massacre: a young librarian, attending a conference in Orlando, indulges in an impulsive sexual encounter, but without explanation the narrative swivels, and for much of the story we’re reading about the caretaker of the hotel where the librarian is staying, and his family. And “Skywalk,” which takes place in St. John’s in the midst of a rash of rapes, tells of university student Chelsea’s quest for a suitable apartment, ranging across her entire life in the process. Moore’s prose is razor-sharp, as are her observations regarding human desire and motivation. There is nothing sentimental in these pages. These are characters who have grit in their shoes, go hungry at night and sometimes find themselves in danger through no fault of their own. Lisa Moore is no ordinary writer: her approach to storytelling is radical and startling, but never gimmicky. Undeniably, Something for Everyone makes demands of the reader, with its loosely plotted stories that veer in unexpected directions without warning. But the challenge the book presents is worth accepting. Its rewards are too numerous to count. show less