Non-F Lorrie Moore's "See What Can Be Done" Book Reviews and Essays on Writers & Whimsies

"See What Can Be Done" is the title of Lorrie Moore's collection of previous reviews & essays on authors, books, writing & whatever struck her fancy.  Moore (b Amer. 1967) is known for award winning short story collections and novels.  She is a writer of perspicacious wit and sardonic humor.  Writing a review on Moore's review is a bit like Rabbit Redux only ridiculous from the point view of Alice Through the Looking Glass with the risk of sounding like an ass.  Moore is fawning in her abject praise for her favorite short story writers, Alice Munro among them.  For those who want to delve into a writer's "Cat's Eye" (Moore is also a fan of Margaret Atwood's writing) this loquacious  collective is for you.  For those (myself included) preferring a cogent capsulation of a book, you need not look into "See What Can Be Done."  However, the most captivating captions have to do with the "art" of critiquing.  "...the idiom of criticism do not belong to artists.  One cannot really dance a review of someone els's dance.  One cannot paint a review of someone else's exhibition.  Criticism can be a rarefied field."  Moore also maintains "...fiction writer reviewing is performing-I still believe an essential task."  It's Moore's introspective look at her own life as a recent college grad and working as a para-legal the most disarming and perhaps revealing as to her chosen literary career.   "{This} exquisitely wrong job did bring me for a brief period, a life in Manhattan-improvised, lonely, exhilarating."   And Moore does provide her own perspectives of writings aims and tribulations.  "The main struggle for every writer is with the dance & limitations of language."  Moore quotes  Anne Beattie's view on a writer's task, "It serves as a kind of flypaper.  It catches the casual thoughts and material detail that define people, places and times."  Yet Moore expounds on a more profound level a writer's task.  "Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life.  That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life."