Lorrie Moore is the poet laureate of hospitals: the disinfectant smells in hallways, the fluorescent lights on top of beds, but most of all the evasive humour that afflicts patient, doctor and visitor alike. In People Like That Are the Only People Here, arguably Moore’s best-known story, a mother can’t help spiralling in the wake of her infant’s scary diagnosis: “When a baby gets cancer, it seems stupid ever to have given up smoking. When a baby gets cancer, you think, Whom are we kidding?” In Face Time, a middle-aged American daughter informs her coronavirus-positive father during a video call that countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, constantly suspicious of their neighbours, seemed to be coping better with the pandemic. “I guess we just weren’t that afraid of Canada,” her father replies. In The Juniper Tree a woman doesn’t visit her dying friend in a hospital, but later sneaks into her house to bid goodbye to her ghost. “No hugs,” her friend – or rather, her apparition – protests. “Everything’s a little precarious, between the postmortem and the tubes in and out all week.”
In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Moore’s fourth novel in a career spanning four decades, the characteristic note is struck early when Finn, a high school teacher in a midwestern town called Navy Lake, is visiting his brother, Max, in a hospice in New York:
