New Yorker Fiction Review #255: "Face Time" by Lorrie Moore

Review of the short story from the Sept. 28, 2020 issue of The New Yorker...

For as familiar as the name Lorrie Moore is to me, and as many short stories as she's had published -- and published in The New Yorker -- I've never reviewed her on this blog and I had trouble calling to mind a single piece of fiction she's written. My point is to say that, although Lorrie Moore's name is definitely out there in the ether of the literature world (I'm sure I read some of her stuff in grad school), I'm not a particularly big enthusiast of her work.

I don't think it's unfair to put her in the same category as Alice Munro, they are both writers of realist fiction that attempts to deal with the actual, micro-level tragedies of regular lives -- the death of a loved one, divorce, sickness, abandonment, aging -- on a mostly light-hearted and even, at times, sardonic level. When I say "realist" it's because most of the characters, settings, and situations, are those that are pretty common in most people's lives, and in clear, easily digestible prose. 

Thus it is with "Face Time," a story about a woman in the early, early days of the COVID-19 pandemic who -- remotely, over the Face Time app -- communicates with her father who is dying of the disease, having gone into the hospital initially to have a knee replacement. 

The story is important in the sense that it catalogs a very specific point in time early in 2020 when, as COVID-19 turned from a remote news story into a daily reality, we as a nation (and a whole global society) were in a free-fall, not knowing how bad things would get or really how to adapt to what was happening to us. It was a confusing time to say the least. For some, such as those depicted in the story and millions of others around the world, it was frightening and tragic. 

What Lorrie Moore has done here is to flesh-out and give fictional voice to an experience that was a reality for hundreds of thousands of people. While I think it's important, in a way, for fiction to mirror the times and to document certain moments in history, the story feels more like a tombstone or a painting than a genuine piece of fiction. Personally, I'm not sure I like it when writers take real-life events and "imagine" them into fiction, although Lionel Shriver has done this a few times, apparently, and in at least one story I can remember, from years ago, about a young woman who fell off her balcony in Midtown Manhattan, but other than that I can't think of a time when it's worked to great advantage. 

This story could have worked a bit better if Lorrie Moore had loaded up the characters, or their relationships, with some other kind of energy that overpowered what was going on with COVID, thereby setting the pandemic as the backdrop for a broader family drama. I think she kind of tried to do this but sometimes when writers give characters idiosyncrasies they seem a bit too much right from the package. I think this story suffered from being too much about COVID and documenting a moment in history, than about the characters.