Lorrie Moore's “Referential:” Quintessentially Contemporary, but Satisfying?

Though Lorrie Moore’s short story, “Referential,” in the May 28th issue of The New Yorker, shares the certain plot elements with Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” Moore's story seems more like a Raymond Carver or Anne Beattie story-a quintessential contemporary piece. Is it an updating of Nabokov, a homage, a full blown story on its own?

I can't answer any of these questions. I can only observe that the style, and the tone, are Moore, and that if she meant to "refer" to Nabokov, it doesn't really show. We always run the risk of letting too much of an original master's story elements sneak in whenever we work to pastiche or redo or well, just fricking play around with it. Joyce carol Oates did this with Chekhov's "Lady with the Pet Dog" to create a kind of contemporary offshoot that is pretty damned cool! I have tried it with Chekhov's "Heartache," and I'm still waiting for the editors to accept it. Ha!

But I guess what I mean about contemporary here is that minuscule architecture described some time ago by Lee K. Abbott. Something to do with of course beginning en medias res, then something happens-sometimes-then a massive compression of conflict-climax-resolution. You aren't supposed to have much exposition, or back-story. But if you do add a smattering, it needs to be in just the right place at the right time and nothing more. Poor Edgar Allen Poe has been likely scratching at his casket cover ever since.

I'm not saying that every contemporary story follows this format, or that it should, or that Abbott advocates that, but its just one of those things one hears about in workshops and leads a writer to think "Are we constructing broken stories?"

Well, back to Moore's "Referential."

First, it’s very short. It begins with a dramatic line whose promise leads the reader to want to read more and expect something, well very dramatic to occur. But then the story promptly delves into two columns of back-story about visiting rules, about the focal character’s son, about Pete, about Pete and her son, about Pete and her, and then about Pete and her visiting her son. The story enters a full scene with the three of them at a visit. Through dialogue and non-dialogue we get the sense of how the focal character and Pete are coming to some kind of trouble. Or that they have but haven’t and won’t talk directly about it, as in the next scene of the drive home.

Finally the last scene continues in the same vein of communicating everything by communicating nothing almost to the point of a Hemingway cliché. In fact, a little of the back and forth in this scene is reminiscent of an Updike “Maple’s” story. The story’s ends with a nod to perhaps Cheever’s "The Country Husband," but instead of kings, elephants, and mountains, Moore's narrator gives us “A Monkey’s Paw. A lady. A tiger.” Then, the last line, that there is nothing means of course there is an implied something.

Endings like this, when they work, force us to review the protagonist’s actions, choices, beliefs, in the hopes that this will refer us inward. Although the “referential” trope within the tiny map of this story reveals interesting networks of emotional pain among, as well as, within the characters, I didn’t find the conclusion as satisfying as the first line promised.

Of course, one could argue that this is the point. That Moore's short story is reflecting the lack of satisfaction that people feel around them, given all their efforts to find gratification in the weft and weave of contemporary life. I like that notion. And I appreciate Moore's craft here, building her story on the bulwark of a classic story.

Either way, not a bad read for a very short piece.

What do you think?