too many Daves

Tonight Lorrie Moore regained her place at the head of the line of writers I haven’t read enough. So before taking my dog for a run, I jumped on the web to search for a free and legal download of a Lorrie Moore story to put on my iPod. In a minute or two, I found this New Yorker podcast of Louise Erdrich reading Moore’s story “Dance in America.” I listened to it twice during my run, and I’m tempted to write a big, long post about this passage:

“Who killed himself?” asks Eugene. He has swallowed all the pills but one.

“Mommy’s first husband,” says Cal.

“Why did he kill himself?” Eugene is staring at the middle of the table, trying to think about this.

“Eugene, you’ve lived with your mother for seven years now, and you don’t know why someone close to her would want to kill himself?” Simone and Cal look straight across at each other and laugh brightly.

Eugene smiles in an abbreviated and vague way. He understands this is his parents’ joke, but he doesn’t like or get it. He is bothered they have turned his serious inquiry into a casual laugh. He wants information! But now, instead, he just digs into the duck, poking and looking.

I’m tempted to write that post. And I may. Some other day. I’ve resolved to sleep more. I’ve been sticking to it. It feels good. So that post — and the bias I bring to reading that passage, as a dad who explains pretty much everything to his kids — will wait.

This is a shorter post. It just involves linking to something great. The New Yorker fiction editor hosted the podcast of Erdrich reading Moore. Her name is Deborah Treisman. She said lots of smart, enthusiastic stuff about Moore. So I Googled her. I found a NYT piece. I found a perfectly decent online chat she did on newyorker .com. And then, Google revealed that — wow! — Treisman did a 2005 interview here in Seattle with Christopher Frizzelle in The Stranger. I especially loved two parts of the interview.

First, this part — mostly because it’s an example of something I wrote about recently, an interview going to an unexpectedly good place precisely because the interviewer says something that could have ruined the whole interview …

Frizzelle: I felt a little intimidated meeting you.

Treisman: Because I’m really scary.

Frizzelle: No. I mean, it’s not even related to you. Do you know what I mean?

Treisman: Yeah. I carry the weight of this 80 years on my shoulders. Everyone puts the magazine on a pedestal and they spend all their time staring up at you adoringly or trying to knock you off that pedestal. There’s such an engaged relationship with the magazine because it’s been around for so long. Even though I’ve only been there for 8 or 9 years, I’m accountable for 70 years before that, somehow.

Frizzelle: Do you feel intimidated by the history?

Treisman: Probably I did when I started. But then ultimately you go into your office every day and you do your job and you don’t think a whole lot about that. Except to the extent that it’s—except for the “wow” factor, where you say, Wow, I work with Roger Angell whose mother was the first fiction editor of the magazine and whose stepfather was E. B. White, and he comes to the fiction meetings and argues with me about stories every day. So you have that factor. Or, Wow, I grew up reading Don DeLillo and now I’m arguing with him over a comma. To that extent, the history is fun, it’s not intimidating.

The second part I loved goes like this …

Frizzelle: Sometimes I get to the very end of a story that I’ve been enjoying all along and the ending really disappoints me.

Treisman: Someone actually just said exactly the same thing in David Shields’s class about the story this week—I don’t know if you’ve read it yet, a Haruki Murakami story, where it’s very vague and then the very last line refers to loneliness. And the student said he just hated that it was made so explicit, that he’d like this guy being lonely without calling it lonely. And I can see the point. It wasn’t something that bothered me when I was reading the story, but I can see that response.

Frizzelle: It’s also easy to criticize the end of a story.

Treisman: There’s so much weighing on it. It’s quite hard to pull out of a story too. That’s often why people write novels, because they can’t pull out. And it’s very hard—there’s so much pressure on the ending either to sum everything up or to culminate in some final image that’s going to say it all, and sometimes you just want to come to a stop, to let something that happened earlier in the story be the central thing.

The whole interview is worth reading. Except the end. The end sucked. Just totally ruined it for me. I don’t even know why I’m writing about it.

I’m considering typing “just kidding” here, but it’s late, I’m tired, and you look shrewd enough to realize I’m kidding all by yourself. Goodnight.