BIRDS OF AMERICA

By Lorrie Moore

Knopf

$23, 291 pp.

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America is a collection of short stories. Originally published individually in magazines, sometimes under other titles, the stories contain a surprisingly strong amount of thematic cohesion. With a few exceptions, the tales each sport an intelligent but dissatisfied heroine, an almost fetish-like interest for said heroine, and a mired or low-key or entirely absent climax.

Each story, for the most part, reads like a memoir of Moore's own life (hence the unusual story structures). Moore, a college English professor, fills the book with twenty- to forty-year-old women, generally scholars; one's an SAT consultant, another a professor, another a librarian and the rest teachers. The exceptions include a middle-aged, forgotten actress and a disillusioned, lovelorn man. The stories are sprinkled with pop culture references to the early nineties: several references to Forrest Gump ("`Such a career-ender for Tom Hanks,'" one character remarks), mention of the Gulf War, of O.J. Simpson--even William Kennedy Smith makes it in (remember him?). But these are all part of Moore's sharp adherence to a realistic world within the novel; it is in the characters where she allows her creative abilities to shine.

Moore's style takes some getting used to. Experimentation within the medium is the name of the game here, and the author seems to enjoy tossing out symbols for their own sake, creating linguistic tricks, and taking flat-out risks--at once point, the word "Ha!" is repeated without interruption over nearly two entire pages. But this Joycean wordplay, disconcerting at first, eventually becomes clear for what it usually is--humor. And that's where the stories get their power. On a surface level, they're a series of often depressing vignettes about dissatisfied, disillusioned adults, but underneath one can find a slightly sardonic, yet often mirthful tone that doles out a plethora of puns and ironic twists.

Of all the themes working through the stories, it is disillusionment that seems to cast its shadow most often upon the main characters. In "Willing," an actress finds herself without money and fame, moves back home and takes up with an auto mechanic: "It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with...She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told `There you go.'" In "Real Estate," a woman named Ruth becomes so dissatisfied with her life that she finds metaphysical consolation only in firing guns. This story contain two plots, the other involving a man who loses his job and becomes an armed robber, only to cross paths with Ruth (for the second time, in truth) in the end.

For the most part, the stories contain interesting characters involved in everyday situations, and Moore explores these while winding intricate thoughts into the heads of her characters. Rarely, if ever, does the omniscient narrator comment on the characters or their actions. One area where Moore seems inclined to stray away from the norm is dialogue; all too often, people say things that just aren't spoken by normal people; they're spoken by people in existentialist plays or in college lectures on surrealism. Occasionally these can be distracting--it's hard to believe that these lines are coming from her own experience--but they're part of her style, and it can work either way, as distracting or amazing, depending on the reader. However, this tendency occurs only in the main characters; the lesser ones are described quite realistically, tend to have the funniest lines and serve to counterbalance the main characters through their familiarity as recognizable, "everyday" people.

Of all the stories, however, there is one that is set quite apart from the rest, written without the subtle humor or the odd dialogue; it's clearly torn from real life. In the cumbersomely title "People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk," a couple undergo the horrific experience of discovering and dealing with cancer in their infant son. Subversively poignant in its subtle bitterness and desperate hope, the story draws the reader into a nightmare world of clean rooms. IV's N-G tubes and veteran parents of sick children, parents weary and glass-eyed but determined to fight for their children to the happy or bitter end.

"People Like That," while heart-wrenching and disturbing to read, is a powerful reminder of the value of life, the inscrutability of fate and the last bastion of human resource: hope. It counterbalances the bitter, estranged characters of the other stories with its forced entrance into the horror that can sometimes be real life. The Husband (each character is given not a name, but a title: the Mother, the Husband, the Baby, the Doctor) says to the Mother: "You know, this is the kind of thing you've always written about," to which she responds, "You are really something, you know that? This is life. This isn't a `kind of thing.'"

While "People Like That" is the strongest piece in the entire book, the other stories, while lacking a certain degree of variety (the names of the characters and the titles of the stories tend to become muddled in one's mind, a happenstance which might be avoided had the stories been read in their individual magazine formats) nonetheless form an effective collection of nineties fiction. A wise suggestion, however, is that each story be read slowly and individually, and not the book as a whole on a beach in the summer or in front of the fireplace on a cold Sunday night. The stories, as mentioned before, tend to start sounding the same when read quickly in order, and they deserve better than that. By reading them carefully, Moore's talent for description, clever wordplay and power through subtlety can be discovered and admired.