Lorrie Moore, _Bark: Stories_

WOULD YOU CALL Lorrie Moore the Deborah Eisenberg of the Midwest? Or is Deborah Eisenberg the Lorrie Moore of the East Coast?

They are certainly distinguishable, but given what they have in common--realist tradition, contemporary settings, subtle sense of humor, gravitating to women characters from the educated classes, light dashes of lyricism in the prose--one quick way to tell their stories apart is that Moore's tend to have a midwestern setting, Eisenberg's a New York-and-environs one.  If (unlikely, I know) one was given a Lydia Davis story and a Mary Gaitskill story, and had to say which was which, you would probably be right nine times out of ten. Or a Ben Marcus story and a George Saunders story.  But with Moore and Eisenberg, you might be stroking your chin for a while,  then just pick based on geographical clues.

This led me to imagine the possibility of a Beatles-Stones or Roth-Updike sort of debate among the fans. The Beatles and the Stones were about the same age, had a lot of the same influences, were playing the same-sort of music, and were contending for the same glittering prizes, so from a sufficiently distant perspective--say, a middle-aged father in Turkey--they might have seemed impossible to tell apart. To their fans, however, the differences are salient and crucial.

 So with Updike and Roth. About the same age, a lot of the same formative influences, working in the same tradition, a lot of the same aspirations. To me, the differences are salient and crucial, era-defining...to most of my students, two guys with fancy prose styles and toxic masculinity issues.

Moore and Eisenberg are not very close in age (Eisenberg is twelve years older), but their first books came out close together (Moore 1985, Eisenberg 1986), they are comparable in output (five collections for Eisenberg, four and three novels for Moore), and they tend to get the same kind of accolades from the same folks. I wouldn't say they are rivals; for all I know, they are good friends and esteem each otrher's work highly. And maybe women writers do not have that who's-number-one anxiety that I imagine Roth and Updike did. But I do wonder what a diehard Moorean would say to a diehard Eisenberger. Something like, "Yeah, I know, but if you really read 'Wings'..."