To celebrate the publication of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore’s first novel in fourteen years, we share an extract from the book’s opening pages.
Lorrie Moore is the award-winning author of five story collections, three novels and a children’s book.
Her novel A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and she has received numerous accolades from the Lannan Foundation, the National Books Critics Circle and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After serving for almost three decades as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Moore is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Her most recent novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, was published by Faber in June 2023.
Korean griddle grease and the smoke from late morning weed in the air, winds light and variable, the sweet-stink of sun-warmed trash bags – this was the Indian Summer the Algonquins had wanted to be rid of, and succeeded, absconding with their jewels and hilarity. The vibrating scorch and scotch of the subway. Sulfurous sewage exhaled from the hard open mouth of the Broadway local. Block after block of brick and concrete buildings – some roaring some asleep – encaged in geometric jungles of scaffolding. Traffic rumbled like a sea, ambulances practiced their glissandos – authority was the merchandise as well as the port. Authority in quotation marks was everybody’s brand. Vespas sped by seemingly without riders.
Finn got the young attendant to retrieve the car from the garage – early from the early bird special. While waiting he noted a bicycle rickshaw slowing in front of him. Its driver resembled Pete Seeger, replete with a neat wool cap, a flannel shirt, suspenders. But instead of crooning “Turn, Turn, Turn,” he was screaming “Watch! Watch! Watch!” at the top of his lungs. “Watch out for the instructions under the hood! Don’t think they’re not there! Be afraid of the silver ladies and the pink wires and the shoes the shoes the shoes . . .” The white schizophrenics were allowed to ride bikes here. The black schizophrenics huddled under blankets and cardboard on sidewalks against the façades of the skyscrapers. Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.
“Hey!” The man running the food cart on the corner of Twenty-Eighth shouted at the Pete Seeger bike cabbie. “Dude! You need a burrito!” Then the bike cabbie drove away. The Chelsea cookware bombs had happened one month before. People were both moving on and not.
The smell of the city in morning, the mix of food and smog, triggered in Finn the trips to strange cities he had taken as a child; he had been made to be up too early, with his school groups, or his family, and now he could feel again the vague terror and strange adventure of a world happening simultaneously and separately from the world he was from. Cities seemed cobbled together from parts of other cities in other times.
‘Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.’
These days people spoke loudly into their own cellphones. He recalled when he had first heard people doing this, at the turn of this century, talking loudly in public on phones he couldn’t see. He had been in disbelief. It was like everyone had willingly become insane. The disbelief times were now gone but the voluntary insanity had remained.
He thanked the valet with a ten then headed out. He no longer knew his way around what he called No York: all these neighborhoods telling him “No.” “NoHo” – a guffawing denial. “NoMad” where he was staying – of course that was where he was staying. “Nolita.” Didn’t he date her in high school? Or rather junior high? A joke had to be revised, polished, rubbed until the genie got out, ran off, and it just wasn’t funny anymore.
His Airbnb was in an industrialized zone of Chelsea and the city jackhammers had kept him up until two in the morning. They were allowed to blast away all night, as if no one actually lived or slept there. He took large swallows of coffee and tested his sanity every morning the same way he did when not on the road: he took out his laptop and replied to the online Times editorials, and waited to see if his reply was actually posted. In this manner he could tell, roughly, how deranged he was that day. He had learned to begin with a compliment to the author of the piece. If he started with “Frank Bruni should go back to reviewing restaurants,” it disappeared into the ether. But if he began “Frank Bruni is brilliant, yet . . . ,” they posted it. Twice he was a Readers’ Pick and once an Editors’ Pick but mostly he was just part of the pile-on that substituted for breakfast conversation before the comments section eventually closed from inundation. He was “Melvin H from Ohio.” And he believed he might be the only Melvin H in Ohio—and since he wasn’t really Melvin H from Ohio, he kind of imagined there were no Melvins in Ohio at all. This all was an inefficient way of testing his own mental health and cognition, since he did not believe the online dementia sites. Those online dementia quizzes were gaslighting him!
In the back of his car was his landlady’s disposable cat box; before he’d left Navy Lake yesterday morning she had asked him to take it with him and dump it somewhere.
“Really?” Finn had asked.
“Any trash bin will do. Just drive away quickly. I don’t know the precise regulations.” But Finn had not pulled over. He had driven straight from Illinois, most of the time forgetting the thing was back there, because he always forgot what was back there. But once in a while he heard it. The box slid along the backseat of his Subaru. On a sharp turn it slid to the other side across the seat and banged up against the door.
Driving toward the Bronx was a nightmare but cheaper than a cab. His GPS attempted to redirect him and all was improvisational. The coils of concrete ramps were a mad nest for some giant bird in a horror movie. On the Grand Central Parkway eighteen-wheelers, fulfillment by Amazon, lurked in Finn’s blind spot then passed violently on the right, splattering mud on his windshield, which he smeared and smudged and dimmed with the wipers on their frantic high speed as well as the squirters with their buoyant blue spritz. Occasionally a truck let loose with its horn, the salvos of an ocean liner come ashore. He had not approached from this direction in a while and hardly had a moment to ponder the sign for the Triborough Bridge and see how it had become the RFK, a carpetbagging brother bridge to the charming prez’s airport. Another thing he could not quite say to his students—for whom he was their official disabuser. But the subject of brothers was on his mind. He was trying to mull moments into anecdotes for his own dying one. They should be anecdotes that were amusing, if the listener were actually leaving this earth. But they should not make the dying laugh in a way that made them want more of life. The dying should laugh wearily in a way that said, OK. OK. Enough.
A tough assignment. He was a teacher but didn’t really believe in assignments at all, let alone tough ones. Why should anyone have to leave after a day of school only to go home and do more work?
And who was Major Deegan anyway?
A take-home exam marked on a bell curve with no liberty, only death. Give me one or the other! Who said that, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen? And why are these two conditions – liberty and death– considered mutually exclusive? Support your argument with examples.
Finn had been teaching school too long. Pop quiz (who was your birth father? one out of every ten people have a different dad from the one they think is theirs). Finn himself believed he and Max were only half brothers. How else to explain both the love and the noncomprehension, a pairing that dogged him. Chalk and cheese. This was his own private theory. Their mother had been, well, romantic.
He was approaching the neighborhood of the hospice with a flash of light scarring the periphery of his right eye – from the glare of steel suddenly pulling into view and causing him to veer. The flash was now etched there, another reminder of the proximity of death, as if he needed one more. When he turned his head, it darted and flew like a quick white bat. He supposed much in his life was exactly that: a truck that had not yet hit his vision and so was just lurking blindly there, reaping and grim. The steady crawl of a tsunami in the rearview mirror, coming up from behind. Instead of slowing, he sped up. How scattered their family had become, both brothers figures of displacement, their departed addresses stacking up thinly behind them, as when people once put new postage stamps on top of old ones, in order to reuse the envelope.
‘How scattered their family had become, both brothers figures of displacement, their departed addresses stacking up thinly behind them, as when people once put new postage stamps on top of old ones, in order to reuse the envelope.’
He swung onto the first Riverdale exit. In addition to the dried filth of the cat box sliding around behind him, glass shards in a paper bag from a broken goblet rattled farther back in the hatch of his car. He kept forgetting about that – forgot until he took a sharp corner as he was doing now and it all clacked around back there louder than the sliding cat box. The Airbnb had kitchen privileges, and he had voluntarily helped with the dishes, though now he had been asked by his host—in addition to dumping his Navy Lake landlady’s litter – to find a replacement amber-hued goblet for the one that had broken when Finn had lifted it, still warm, out of the dishwasher. Tasked onerously by both the Airbnb host and his landlady: this new condition seemed his strange and unexpected fate. Last night Finn had wrapped the glass in a newspaper and placed it in the kitchen trash can. He had failed to leave a note to explain properly. So in the morning the host removed the entirety of it and constructed a tiny sculpture – the stem holding the jagged amber pieces skyward – replete with an angry cardboard sign that read WTF? in bright black Sharpie. Because Finn’s brother was dying, even the idea of this assignment to find a “replacement glass” – or else he would be fined and kitchen privileges would be revoked, the cardboard also said – irritated the hell out of him. By emptying the dishwasher he had only been trying to help – though he’d been trying to do that his whole life. He had moved out of his Navy Lake condo with Lily so she could have the time to think, which she’d requested, and now he had a landlady’s litter box in his car. Then this morning, the note he received alongside the broken glass which included the request “Look at the photos on the crystal sites. Perhaps you will find a replacement online among the special crystal. But you will probably have to look in all the fine glassware shops. I can’t remember where I bought it but I absolutely cannot entertain without a matching replacement glass.”
Look at the photos on the crystal sites?
Just last month his same Navy Lake landlady had made Finn go to the plumbing showroom to shop for a new toilet to replace the limed-up one his bowels had fallen victim to his second day of residence. The salesman on the showroom floor had sized up Finn’s thighs: “You may need a larger seat,” he said and had him sit down on several of the toilets in the public showroom. He directed Finn to yet another. And soon Finn was striding from display toilet to display toilet and just sitting on them. “Well now try this higher one? More comfortable for reading? Now stand and face the toilet so we can see how the aim would be.”
“I don’t think a man has ever spoken so intimately to me before,” Finn had said.
And then the salesman showed him how the seat would fall in slow motion rather than with a loud clack. “Your wife will like that.” Finn knew he was then supposed to reveal he wasn’t married but instead he just said, “Will she?” What he really wanted to say as he sat on various toilets all around the showroom was May I please have a little privacy?
He would tell his brother, Max, these stories to amuse and distract him – “It was like taking crap after crap right there in the store!” – to let Max know the madness of the world he was leaving. Not that Max didn’t know, but there were illustrations that might ease the transition.
Buy the Book
From one of the most celebrated imaginations in American literature, Lorrie Moore’s new novel is a magic box of longing and surprise.