See What Can Be Done:

Essays, Criticism, and Commentary
Lorrie Moore

A Writer on Writers and Writing – This 407-page essay collection by acclaimed fiction writer Lorrie Moore covers numerous subjects adeptly and artistically; the book sings particularly to me when Moore turns her keen eye, skilled sense of the telling detail, and mighty ability to wield words onto the work of fellow writers. When she notes: “Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one’s life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life.” When she praises the craft of Anne Beattie – Beattie’s endings, Beattie’s dialogue. When Moore wonders about Dawn Powell’s influence: “So current and alive is Powell’s epistolary voice, even in the earliest letters, that one is tempted to suggest that what we now think of as the contemporary American voice – in journalism and the arts – is none other than hers: ironic, triumphant, mocking, and game; the voice of a smart, chipper, small-town Ohio girl newly settled in New York just after the First World War.”  When Moore criticizes Nancy Milford for applauding Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” calling it mawkish and folksy; Moore obviously never experienced Eugene Burger’s performance of the poem! When Moore observes, “That many young people are already writing their memoirs is no longer a funny thing to say but an actual cultural condition.” And, ultimately – perfectly – when Moore relates a story about John Cheever, told by a painter at Yaddo. “She was sitting next to Cheever discussing upstate New York, and told him, ‘Last year, I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hortense.’ ‘Oh, what a wonderful sentence!’ he exclaimed. I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hortense! At which point the painter thanked her lucky stars that she wasn’t a writer, since she had no idea what was remotely lovely about that sentence.”