Yet despite the connection readers feel to Moore’s heroines, her writing maintains a careful distance, epitomizing a formal rigor that never confuses the use of the personal for artistic effect with the confessional. Moore will not confess. She mines the events and characters of her life, not in search of closure or catharsis but to bend and shape them to her artistic purpose.
Her new novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” her first in 14 years, is a stylistic departure that finds her stretching her voice to explore the surreal borderlands of grief. An experiment jumping between the 19th and 21st centuries, it strays from the contemporary world she’s a master of portraying. Chronicling a road trip taken by a mourning man and the walking, talking corpse of his dead lover, it leaps into the fantastical in a way Moore never has before. But like all her writing, “I Am Homeless” uses elevated, often dazzling language to evoke a complex emotional state. Like all things that dazzle, Moore’s language can illuminate, and it can obscure — sometimes it can even hurt your eyes. Moore seems to find all these effects equally useful.
As both a surfer and lifeguard, Luke knows what the ocean is capable of. Just a week before the Eddie, one of his childhood best friends, Kala Grace, had an almost-fatal accident at nearby Pipeline. Luke saw Kala dragged out of the ocean, concussed and bleeding, and it was Luke who put the oxygen mask on his friend’s face. Throughout the frenzy, what everyone remembers is Luke remaining calm and focused.
Luke, by the way, is known as “Casual Luke.” In Hawaii. Which is like being called “Neurotic Matt” on the island of Manhattan. The nickname came to be after a really good day out in the water, when Luke was just shredding wave after wave. The surfer Mason Ho told Luke that he was “casually causing casualties.” But any of Luke’s friends will tell you that it stuck because he’s especially humble and chill. For this reason, sometimes they also call him “Laid-Back Luke.”
The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when pain is both ubiquitous and mundane? The answer comes in bodily connection, but physical encounters may result merely in the transfer of pain.
Can a film be cursed? Or is it the system behind the film — Hollywood and all its many shades of corruption — that’s toxic? It’s a central question of Craig Russell’s excellent, engrossing historical horror novel, one that explores the symbiosis of power and evil in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Whatever it meant to be a Floridian while I was growing up is no longer accessible as an identity. Too many beautiful places have been drained dry, or buried beneath concrete. That’s what happens when the population of your home state explodes almost sevenfold in your lifetime.
Anne Hull conveys the loss starkly in “Through the Groves,” her new memoir: “Almost nothing in Florida stays the way it was. It’s bought, sold, paved over and reimagined in a cycle that never quits. The landscape I saw through my father’s windshield as a child has been so thoroughly erased I sometimes wonder if I made it up.”