Salon | Excerpt: Birds of America


Fiction Birds of America By Lorrie Moore Excerpt_\|_Review The Voyage of the Narwhal By Andrea Barrett Excerpt_\|_Review Blindness By José Saramago Excerpt_\|_Review Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Morton Excerpt_\|_Review Thirst By Ken Kalfus Excerpt_\|_Review Nonfiction The Professor and the Madman By Simon Winchester Excerpt_\|_Review A Beautiful Mind By Sylvia Nasar Excerpt_\|_Review At Home With the Marquis de Sade By Francine du Plessix Gray Excerpt_\|_Review A Slant of Sun By Beth Kephart Excerpt_\|_Review We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families By Philip Gourevitch Excerpt_\|_Review - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - -				__________________e__x__c__e__r__p__t ________________________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Birds of America BY LORRIE MOORE FICTION KNOPF 291 PAGES People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk "The Baby won't suffer as much as you," says the Surgeon. And who can contradict? Not the Baby, who in his Slavic Betty Boop voice can say only mama, dada, cheese, ice, bye-bye, outside, boogie-boogie, goody-goody, eddy-eddy, and car. (Who is Eddy? They have no idea.) This will not suffice to express his mortal suffering. Who can say what babies do with their agony and shock? Not they themselves. (Baby talk: isn't it a stitch?) They put it all no place anyone can really see. They are like a different race, a different species: they seem not to experience pain the way we do. Yeah, that's it: their nervous systems are not as fully formed, and they just don't experience pain the way we do. A tune to keep one humming through the war. "You'll get through it," the Surgeon says. "How?" asks the Mother. "How does one get through it?" "You just put your head down and go," says the Surgeon. He picks up his file folder. He is a skilled manual laborer. The tricky emotional stuff is not to his liking. The babies. The babies! What can be said to console the parents about the babies? "I'll go phone the oncologist on duty to let him know," he says, and leaves the room. "Come here, sweetie," the Mother says to the Baby, who has toddled off toward a gum wrapper on the floor. "We've got to put your jacket on." She picks him up and he reaches for the light switch again. Light, dark. Peekaboo: where's baby? Where did baby go? SALON \| Dec. 21, 1998 Lorrie Moore is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, "The Best American Short Stories" and "Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards." She is the author of two novels and two previous short-story collections. "Birds of America": ORDER A COPY__\|__SALON REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - G O+T O+\| Fiction Awards \| Nonfiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.