And I Thought My Jokes Were Bad

Lorrie Moore's I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. By Lorrie Moore. New York: Vintage, 2024. 208 pp. $18.

He stepped toward her again, and this time she did not move back and soon she was slumped against him and he held her, with some deep and unnameable emotion, stepping on the immense shoes, his hands in her hair, his coat sleeves around her thin, muddy, cold apparel made familiar with her old perfume.

It’s quite the trick Lorrie Moore managed with her latest, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home. Whatever that “deep and unnameable emotion” is, the critics who called the novel “strange and compelling”, a work of “determined strangeness and pain”, “haunting and strange”, must have felt it along with Moore, and with Finn, her main character. Perhaps strange is a good substitute for “unnameable”. Other readers might ask that novelists be able to name things, and wonder what’s going on when they can’t. They might call Moore’s bluff. A horror novel is meant to scare us, and a comic novel is meant to make us laugh, so if the point of Moore’s fiction is to make us feel things, compelling, strange things, this “deep and unnameable” business is a little like I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home’s equivalent of a line like “then something really scary happened,” or “then something really funny happened.” For some, this just won’t do, and for them, the feeling I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home brings—perhaps the title repeated a few times gets you there already—is itching frustration.