I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

He then remembered: others did not see his and Lily's as a mutual love and why would they. There were too many jealous bumps, sudden disappearances, pointed rebukes--no one saw theirs as the passion it was. It looked like weariness and defeat and sometimes it was, but it was weariness and defeat as attachment. It was passion-at-peace, adoration gone awry and away, then returned, love in the armistice, which one never had without a little war. Finn and Lily's love was a shared secret--though shared secret was one of those phrases that also meant its opposite. Like cleave. Or overlook. Nor one seemed to have seen what he had seen, or known what he had known: that he and Lily were water birds who'd mated for life--and yet often conducted their lives separately in another part of the meadow or the pond.

Finn leaves the side of his dying brother to face urgent news about his estranged partner, Lily: she's killed herself, and in gruesome fashion--letting the water from the shower in the psych ward fill her lungs. He wanders to the "green burial" site where she has been deposited, only to find her sitting in the dirt, alive. It's the ultimate fantasy, the dream that follows everyone who's lost a loved one, the dream of more time. Finn and Lily climb into his car for one final road trip, from New York to Knoxville, Tennessee, where, we are told, a more desirable sustainable cemetery awaits. Joyed at Lily's return, Finn ignores that the road trip must needs head toward a second death, a second loss. For a moment, they are the couple they once were, joking and sniping at one another, indulging in the hokey wordplay that characterizes Moore's writing, though this time Lily's longing to die haunts him in a more concrete way.

This is the first of Moore's novels that I've read that I thought just didn't work. Moore's jokiness works well enough, but not always, in the repartee between Finn and Lily, but in the lengthy opening scene with Finn and his brother Max, it seems (for the first time) pointless and cheesy. The road trip is too talky, with no sense of motion or change, no interest in landscape or event--leaving us only with the words that don't quite work. More confusing still, I felt, were the interwoven passages from a 19th century innkeeper who admits to killing a chauvinistic resident-slash-suitor, and which turn out to be leaves in a diary that Finn reads in a Tennessee inn while Lily sleeps. The antiquated voice is not quite right, and the story too thin to stand of interest on its own. Yet the connection with Finn and Lily--between, perhaps, the urge to kill and the urge to die--seems also half-baked.

I sort of expected this to pull together in the end; in each of Moore's books there have been moments of doubt for me that were ultimately put to rest. She has a knack for prodding a reader with the ridiculous, and then justifying it, but here, the final act never seems to come. It's a shame, because the core moment of the novel--the pure, unlooked-for grace of finding the dead living, followed by the bittersweet realization that death can only be postponed, never stopped--is powerful.