Anagrams by Lorrie Moore

When I was little, I didn't understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, "Donna who?" I would say, "Donna Gilbert." I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Cosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holliday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover than Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive even the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things. When you wanted someone to say, "I love you," approximate assemblages--igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe--however lovely, didn't quite make it. "You are my honey bunch" was not usually interchangeable with "You are my bunny hutch." In a New York suburban bathroom, early in the morning, a plea for sight could twist, grow slightly, re-issue itself as an announcement of death.

"There was a period," writes Benna Carpenter, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, "where I kept trying to make anagrams out of words that weren't anagrams? moonscape and menopause; gutless and guilts, lovesick and evil louse." Near-likenesses dominate the novel. In each section, Benna, along with her friend Gerard, leads a slightly different life: in the first, they live as quasi-lovers in two adjoining apartments, in the next they are friends collaborating on a garage sale. He's a kindergarten teacher, then an opera singer. It's enough to make the reader go back and re-read, looking for something they've missed: how did we get from A to B? But these are parallel stories, not chronological ones, versions of a life that don't quite superimpose neatly upon another. The effect is of a novel in constant self-revision, first in short bursts, then a much longer section--in which Benna is a hapless instructor of poetry who has an affair with her most talented student--finds the story it wants to tell. But what's happened to Benna's other lives?

At first, I thought I could tell that Anagrams, Moore's debut novel, was less sophisticated than her novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which I thought was terrific. For one, it's obsessed with puns, and not always good ones: a character tossing a pillow is said to "throw cushion to the wind." Surely, I thought, this is the work of a writer who will later find more interesting and subtle kinds of wordplay. But the more I read, I became convinced that the silly puns emerge from the same place as Benna's compulsion to look for anagrams that don't really exist, or her childhood wonder at how changing a single letter can change a whole word: the frightening belief that, if one detail in one's life changes, everything might change. Which means that there are all sorts of phantom lives out there that you might have lead. They might even be collected in the same book.

For the Benna of "The Nun of That," the long last section, one of those unlived lives is the one in which she had a child. Throughout the section, Benna spars verbally with her precocious and creative young daughter George, who happens to be entirely imagined. Moore says this from the outset, "my imaginary daughter," but then drops it, so that the reader easily forgets--or thinks, perhaps, surely that's not what she meant. But George really is imaginary, and by the section's end--marked by a profound, sudden, and surprising loss, the reminder that Benna's daughter isn't real amplifies the staggering sense of being left totally alone. Though Anagrams has a silly and anarchic vibe at times, with its wordplay and silly puns, I wasn't prepared for how much of a gut-punch this would be. One expects, or hopes, to turn the page, have the narrative reset again, to see the characters in new professions, new lives, new roles, but in the end the life you receive is the one you must end up living.