Book Review - Anagrams

This book was devastating – devastatingly funny, devastatingly honest. And its denouement, or the final unraveling of plot complexities, is devastatingly sad.

Let me back up for a minute. "Anagrams" rearranges and frames three characters dynamically against each other, first in a sequence of short scenes, then in a longer sustained story. So the key characters – like letters in an anagrammatic word – function differently, contribute to a separate-though-equally-plausible reality, when located in varying relationships with each other.

The elements consist, primarily, of Benna, Gerard, and Eleanor. The first two are archetypal lovers and their affairs shift “requitedness”. Eleanor, as friend and rival (both imagined and real), perhaps functions hermeneutically, as a way to comment on the story, present a foil, or just add a third tip to the triangle, echoing the question: why is it so hard for two people to just love each other?

Known principally as a short story writer, Moore creates a novel with a vividly cinematic eye (an image of a menstrual stain on a nightgown waving in a tree at a yardsale resonates with loss and loneliness) paired with pithy humor. Her dialogues (and internal monologues) capture our awkwardness and nerdy, punny humor (“endurance is a country in Central America”).

The characters are often pictured as flailing intellectuals, with jobs like hotel lounge pianist, geriatric aerobics teacher, poetry teacher at a community college, representing, yes, characters of a certain age, angry at themselves for not making harder decisions, for not taking harder chances, and angry at the world for making it so damn hard. I’m quick to point out that it’s not an angsty anger. It’s the anger you feel for someone you want to live with forever, but who always leaves an eggy mess on the kitchen burners and really, why do you always have to clean it up? It’s a relatably self-conscious, and hilarious, despair.

I read this book very slowly, so it wouldn’t be over soon, so I could savor each bite. And it is biting. The description of the book as a love story, and of the characters as angry, does not quite give the novel credit. Its metapoetic touches, and light sense of balance and boundary, enables it to evade those clichéd generalizations (really, even the generalization of it as a novel is not apt). It’s sensitive, sad, and flirty. It’s solid, addicting and silky. It is, as they say, a “good read”.