- Lorrie Moore - Rea Award
Anagrams was marketed as the debut novel of short story writer Lorrie Moore. In fact, Anagrams lacks the flow and cohesive plot structure of a novel, and should be viewed as a collection of four stand-alone short stories and a novella.
Short Stories Versus Novel Chapters
Distinguishing between short story collections and novels can be difficult when the stories/chapters are connected through recurring characters and unbroken forward momentum. Linked story collections (also called story cycles and story series) work as either novels or collections, because while they follow a loose story arc and deal sequentially with a set of characters, each chapter stands on its own as a finished work.
John Updike's Linked Stories
An example of a successful linked story collection is John Updike’s Too Far To Go, which is a set of 17 short stories following a rough timeline of a marriage and eventually divorce of The Maples, a middle class New England couple. Many of the stories in Too Far To Go were published originally as independent short stories in the New Yorker, and taken separately they are each clear and whole unto themselves. Read as a novel, however, the stories are well paced and bonded together, and the pleasure of reading each single piece is increased by the experience of reading the ordered set.
Lack of Coherent Plot Line
In contrast, the chapters in Anagrams do not follow a plot line, and aside from their names, which are always Benna and Gerard, and the name of the town they live in, which is always Fitchville, the central characters are unrelated from one chapter to the next. The book is divided into five chapters, the first four accounting for half the total pages, and the final one taking up the rest.
Confusion From The Beginning
In chapter one, Benna is a lounge singer and Gerard teaches pre-school aerobics. Gerard lives across the hall from Benna and is in love with her. In chapter two, Benna is a Geriatric Aerobics instructor and Gerard is a jazz musician. Gerard still lives across the hall from Benna, but now she is the one in love. In chapter three, Gerard is leaving for Law School in California, and Benna speaks on the phone to her mother. In chapter four Gerard is a Graduate Assistant and Benna is an Art History Professor. In chapter five Benna’s mother has been dead for 24 years, and Benna and Gerard are friends who have never dated. In some of the stories Benna has a deceased lawyer husband; in some of the stories Benna has a six-year-old daughter.
Not A Post-Modern Novel
What makes Anagrams a story collection, rather than an inventive, post-modern novel? The key is that the four pieces comprising the first half of Anagrams stand alone as traditional short fiction. One way to determine whether two consecutive stories work as novel chapters is to look at where one ends and the next begins. In a novel, there will be an obvious relationship between the two—in a story collection there may not.
Awkward Transitions
In the first chapter, “Escape From The Invasion of The Love-Killers,” Benna and Gerard are introduced as lovers with jobs and neighboring apartments. “Gerard Maines lived across the hall from a woman named Benna…He worked with children all day, teaching a kind of aerobics to pre-schoolers…” And later, “Benna was a night club singer. Four nights a week she…went off to sing at the various cocktail lounges around Fitchville.” The chapter end feels final, with Benna breaking Gerard’s heart, “Look, I’m going through life alone right now…” The last sentence reads, “ He stood and went back across the hall, where he lived.”
Short Stories, Not Chapters
Chapter two, “Strings Too Short to Use,” opens briskly with a monologue from Benna, “Although I was between jobs and afraid I would slip into the cracks and pauses of two different Major Medical policies, I was pleased when they said I had a lump in my breast.” It goes on to describe the relationship between two people who are lovers living across from one another. As unsuspecting readers of this “novel” we must assume chapter two takes place before chapter one—that is the only way the Benna we know from chapter one could be unemployed, and that she and Gerard could still be dating. But as the story unfolds, we learn that this Gerard is a pianist, and this Benna is an exercise instructor.
Inconsistent Characters
We learn that Benna wants what she calls “ a marriage equivalent,” and that Gerard is, unlike his responsible chapter one self, “…like a teenage son. He was out five nights a week and in the day was sleepy and hungry and sprawled, eating a lot of cold cereal, and leaving the bowls around.” Like the first chapter, the second ends with the break-up of Benna and Gerard, this time initiated by Gerard: “Benna,” said Gerard, the day I left. “Babe, I’m really sorry.”
The same pattern follows in the later chapters. Every story in Anagrams has a beginning, middle, and end-like ending, the next starting up firmly, as though on its own.
Publisher's Marketing Concerns
Publishers famously prefer novels to short story collections because they are much easier to sell to the major distributors. The hardest form of fiction to sell is the novella, which may explain why Anagrams got the packaging it did. The risk of miss-labeling a book like this is creating confusion for the reader. Anagrams makes a sharp, tight collection of short fiction, and a disjointed, plot-less muddle of a novel, discrediting both Lorrie Moore and her publisher, and wasting the time of the reader.
1. Moore, Lorrie. Anagrams. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.
2. Updike, John. Too Far To Go. New York: Fawcett Publications, 1979.
Eva Gordon - Eva Sage Gordon
