Such a narrative may be written or it may be spoken.
“I did not know whether he had the right eye color for who they all thought he was, but that would be no problem if I could stick the eyes shut with goat glue.” The implication is that identity is flexible, easily adjusted to fit the necessities of narrative. “Perhaps Jack the boarder had seeded his own rumors,” the innkeeper observes. Yet even here, Moore seeks to confound us. When, after death, his identity is uncovered (I will not share it here), it comes as the best kind of surprise: inevitable if also unexpected, like a key turning in a lock. The innkeeper, for instance, is infatuated with a guest named Jack, an actor who may also be a fugitive he claims to have pensions from both the Confederate and Union armies.
Moore takes her time in making the connection between then and now explicit among the abiding pleasures of her new novel is the extent to which it requires us to read between the lines. The inn sits on South Sunken Road, which played a key role in the Battle of Antietam, where nearly 23,000 died or were wounded on the most death-drenched day in United States history.
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Moore complicates the timeline by interweaving another narrative, told via a series of letters written by an innkeeper to her sister just after the end of the Civil War. All that was left was the Cubs and the Indians.” The defining ethos of the year, Moore insists, is flipping the finger in various directions: “politicians to their parties, voters to the candidates, candidates back to the people, Stockholm to novelists, Bob Dylan to Stockholm. The brothers, despite being from Illinois, are unsure which team to root for “I kind of want Cleveland,” Finn admits, to which Max responds, “Oh, come on, no, you want Cleveland? I kind of want Cleveland too.” The Series is just one emblem of a larger state of disunion. The Chicago Cubs are in the World Series for the first time since 1945, but there’s not even solace in that. The country itself is about to face a terrible reckoning. It’s the fall of 2016 and Finn’s brother, Max, is in hospice in the Bronx. A part of me wants to recommend the same approach, but then you wouldn’t be reading this review. I’ve long admired Moore’s work, especially the collections “ Birds of America” and “ Bark.” (Her story “ People Like That Are the Only People Here,” about a mother confronting a 1-year-old’s cancer diagnosis, may be the most ruthless piece of fiction I know.) Still, I avoided any advance notice of this book. In a certain sense, that has happened here. My favorite reading experiences are those where I arrive knowing nothing, without preconceptions of any kind. “Death was a sea,” Moore writes in the early pages, “and Life was another sea.” Those capital letters are as instructive as they are intentional, one of the many ways the novel teaches us how it means to be read. Rather, it is novel as metaphysical meditation. Mostly centered on a middle-aged high school teacher named Finn who is navigating both the impending death of his older brother and a more elusive sort of loss involving his ex-girlfriend Lily, the book comes billed as a ghost story, but that isn’t exactly right. Lorrie Moore’s fourth novel, “ I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” is, as Winston Churchill once observed of the Soviet Union, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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