Lorrie Moore delivers strong opinions on Wisconsin and her peers

“Decades collide, intersect, are placed side by side in a charged and vibrating conversation,” Lorrie Moore writes in a 2004 review of an Alice Munro story collection.

One could say the same for Moore’s own “See What Can Be Done,” which gathers more than 60 of her nonfiction reviews, essays and commentary – including three perceptive reflections on Munro.

Moore wrote all but a dozen of the pieces collected here while living and teaching for nearly three decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before leaving for warmer pastures in Tennessee.  Wisconsin looms large in this collection.

There’s a tribute to Frederic Cassidy, UW’s beloved godfather of the “Dictionary of American Regional English.”  Reflections on the Walker recall election in 2012 and Hillary Clinton’s defeat here in 2016.  Best of all, there’s a passionate indictment of a provincial mindset and backward state legal system that railroaded Steven Avery.  Twice.

Moore writes well on politics, as well as film and television, music and theater; her essay on a landmark 2007 production of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” – sharply observed and gorgeously written – is the best among scores of reflections on this production. Including my own.

Theater is often on Moore’s mind. Ann Beattie is compared to Terrence McNally and Wendy Wasserstein. Joyce Carol Oates is compared to Brecht.  Philip Roth is compared to Sondheim. Par for the course: In an essay recalling her short stint as a New York paralegal after college, Moore notes that even though she was broke, she scraped money together to see Liza and Bette.

But Moore is at her best when she writes about other writers – with generosity but also candor, of a sort that’s often in short supply these days whenever fiction writers review each other.

Here’s an illustrative sentence from Moore’s review of Updike’s early stories: “His eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story’s way.” That’s beautifully stated, and spot-on: Updike’s writing is always good, even though his scope can be claustrophobically narrow.

Moore invariably places writers in “vibrating conversation” with each other.

Atwood is compared to Dante. Munro’s sense of the tension between artistic and loving selves draws a comparison to James. Vonnegut is a “postmodern Mark Twain: grumpy and sentimental, antic and religious. He is that paradoxical guy who goes to church both to pray fervently and to blow loud, snappy gum bubbles at the choir.”

As this description of Vonnegut suggests, Moore is resolutely populist in her prose as well as her politics; she may have spent her career at universities and written many of these pieces for The New York Review of Books, but her writing is free of stuffy academic jargon.  As in her fiction, she’s also funny.

No wonder she loves Shakespeare – and has no use for the nobs who insist some aristocrat must have written his plays.  “They are the same elitists,” she writes, “who think things like the roots of rock ‘n’ roll are actually white.”

Moore isn’t afraid to take a stand.

Her essay on O.J. Simpson becomes an indictment of white racist violence.  Stephen Stills “is the most talented” of the quartet that included Crosby, Nash and (sometimes) Young.  Vonnegut’s plots are “ramshackle.”  Roth’s celebrated, late 1990s trilogy can’t match the preceding three novels.  And nobody but nobody writes short stories like the great Munro.

Like Munro, Moore is the sort of feminist who refuses to be pigeonholed; she’s too expansive for that. She champions the much-maligned Edna St. Vincent Millay, onetime “Cosmopolitan” editor Helen Gurley Brown and Bobbie Ann Mason alongside usual suspects like Atwood, Lispector and Oates.  She confesses unabashed love for “The Titanic.”

Unlike that vessel, Moore sails on; now 61, she could still have decades ahead for more gems like those gathered here.  Moore places a premium in these pieces on the “resilience” demonstrated by some of her subjects.  Let’s hope she continues to exhibit the same, giving us more of the short stories for which she’s renowned – and the essays for which she should be.