On and On

When I read Lorrie Moore’s “How,” it just seemed to drone on. It repeated the same phrases over and over again, like “a week, a month, a year” and “an endless series of tests,” which made the story seem endless. While I don’t think that these repetitions made it the most exciting story to read, they did help me better understand how the narrator is feeling and where she is coming from. The entire story is about how she is bored with her relationship and is trying to find ways to get out of it, so what better way to convey her boredom than repeating the same words so that the reader also becomes bored?

I still liked this story though and found it pretty different from some of the others we’ve read in Self-Help so far. For one thing, the plot elements in it are very vague. The narrator starts by saying, “Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory….” All of these details seem chosen at random, like the narrator is just dreaming up various scenarios in which she could have meet this man--she doesn’t give an exact recount of her first encounter with him, unlike in “How to Be an Other Woman” when that narrator tells us exactly that they “[met]” in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night…. In front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window…. He emerges from nowhere… asks you for a light….” etc. Beside him on the bus, she’s reading Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. The fact that this narrator remembers all of these details from when she first met her lover shows that that moment is very special to her, whereas since the narrator in “How” just vaguely lists of ways she could have possibly met him, their meeting seems a lot less important, which adds to the boredom and indifference from her towards her relationship throughout the story.

By the end, I was tired of her just trudging through this relationship and was ready for her to move on. I felt really bad for her partner because he tries so hard, but at the same time he also doesn’t deserve the not-so-great way she treats him. I thought they would both be better off separate, especially the narrator because she would be free and happy. Except she isn’t, and when she finally does break it off, the boredom of “a week, a month, a year,” and “an endless series of tests” is still there, and the ending is just another “one of those endings.”