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:
“The hospice gave everyone their own room. Dying was private. But perhaps the mortally ill needed company and should all be sleeping together in the same room. When one person died it was a tragedy. But when two or three people were dying together, it had a chance of becoming a comedy. Not a big chance, but some. Half. Less than half probably.”
Finn tries his utmost to make his brother laugh, or at least to keep him awake. He starts off by telling Max the story of how he was temporarily suspended from his job after the headteacher’s wife came on to him. Before long, he is sharing conspiracy theories about the moon landing. Moore excels in these moments, these neurotic but intimate conversations that go nowhere, and the scenes in the hospice are viscerally done. There is Max, with his eyes always fixed on the baseball game on TV, while listening for hours to the latest drama in Finn’s life. When Finn reveals that he is still not over his ex-girlfriend, Lily, though they’ve been separated for a year, Max can’t resist being the quintessential older sibling. “I feel sorry for you, man,” he blurts out, forgetting about the oxygen tubes taped up to his nose.
Lily has a history of resolute suicide attempts and Finn receives a text while at the hospice hinting that the worst might have come to pass. He bribes Max’s Ghanaian aide, pleads with his brother to stay alive (“I’m your death doula, bro”), before setting off on the 17-hour drive back to Navy Lake. But he arrives too late. Lily has already been buried, according to her wishes, in a “green cemetery”. Finn goes on to do something even Hamlet didn’t: he digs up his lover’s unmarked grave. Man and corpse then head out on a cross country road trip, ostensibly to a forensic research facility in Tennessee where the couple had pledged to donate their bodies together once, but really so that Finn can talk to Lily’s ghost for days inside his car. Their banter is alternately droll and philosophical, reminiscent of languorous movies such as Before Sunset and Only Lovers Left Alive. One moment Lily is apologising for her decaying teeth and the worms in her hair (“I guess death is kind of a spectrum”), the next reproaching Finn for never quite grasping her private despair. Moore doesn’t divulge much about the couple’s past – enough, however, to ascertain that theirs was a relationship unequal in love. “I’m a lot of things I didn’t tell you,” Lily brags at one point. “Because you knew I knew,” Finn replies.
“I want you in the world, where you belong,” Finn tells Lily’s ghost. But of course, that isn’t possible – not with Lily, not with Max. Moore shows that grief and ghosts can be written about persuasively, and wittily, without turning a novel into a horror story. Halfway through his otherworldly odyssey, Finn stops at a hotel where the woman at the front desk doesn’t bat an eye at the fact that he is checking in with a grubby corpse. “We’re no strangers to swamp people,” the woman shrugs. Sometime after the civil war, the hotel was run by another woman, Elizabeth, and she, too, had once let a dead body stay unburied for days in these rooms. One evening she ended up poisoning an eccentric lodger in his bath, a Confederate supporter who’d shamelessly flirt with her (“I do desire that we be better strangers”). The next morning she pretended to chance upon the body with her housemaid, who then neglected to inform the sheriff for too long. A century and a half later, Finn discovers Elizabeth’s journal in his room, written in the form of letters to her dead sister. Moore has primed the reader in advance for this encounter by inserting excerpts from her letters throughout the novel.
In one of Moore’s earliest stories, How to Become a Writer, the narrator recalls the time her high school English teacher returned a story she’d submitted with the comment that she lacks a sense of plot. The narrator went home and scribbled below the teacher’s note: “Plots are for dead people, pore-face.” Moore has lived up to this credo in her shorter fiction; her marvellously uneventful tales of dating, illness and loss are often propelled by a zany voice. Her novels, though, have been ambitious in a different way. A Gate at the Stairs, published in 2009, was expansive and featured a dead child, a mixed-race adoption, and a boyfriend who turns out to be a terrorist. Her latest novel is of course about dead people and therefore has a plot, and yet Moore manages to pack in a civil war-era legend, a brother’s final moments in a hospice, and a road novel in less than 200 pages. I Am Homeless is a triumph of tone and, ultimately, of the imagination. For Moore, death doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a story.
• I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
