Lorrie Moore's "If This Is Not My Home Then I'm Homeless" Grieving is Hopefulness

I maintain that every war novel or film is an anti-war protest.  I also attest all stories about death and grieving to be life affirming.  Lorrie Moore is a distinguished writer of literary novels and short stories. With her newest novel, "If This Is Not My Home Then I'm Homeless" she takes on a journey with the protagonist and his estranged lover.  During their mystical, twilight road trip, the couple rehash what they mean to each other and how they've let the other down. The main character, Finn is a flailing h.s. history-teacher recently suspended for questionable, ethical behavior.  Finn heads to the bedside of his beloved, older brother Max whose in hospice care.  Finn feels remorse for not having been closer with his brother.  He fleetingly tries to bridge a bond that while never broken, was never as Finn would have hoped.  Max has led a more settled life with his wife and career.  Max encourages Finn to reconsider his relationship with his estranged girlfriend Lily.  Beautiful, vivacious Lily has been battling clinical depression.  She was hospitalized several times after attempting to end her life.  Finn is a bombastic intellectual who lives to be argumentative and without ever having committed fully to anything or anyone.  While Finn and Max are watching a World Series game, Finn receives a call regarding Lily and told it's imperative he come for her immediately.  Finn leaves his brother's bedside and takes off despite the fact he and Lily had separated and recently she became involved with another man.  When Finn arrives, he's stunned to learn Lily had killed herself and the burial had already taken place.  Finn rushes to the cemetery and seems nonplussed upon finding Lily waiting for him alongside her graveside.  Finn and the incandescent Lily convene while on a meandering car ride with no clear destination.  Finn implores Lily, "I've changed my mind.  It's not too late for you to change yours.  I know you can do it."  With Moore's deft writing she's able to convince readers Finn and Lily are in their own  purgatory from which they could both emerge nascent and fully cognizant of what they desire in life.  "Perhaps he and Lily had moved out of controlled hallucination into random reality shards."  Finn's narrative is interwoven with an epistolatory, chronicle of a 19th C boarding house matron who relieves her daily trials and tribulations in correspondences to her cherished sister.  The enigma of how these two unrelated stories will merge is another tribute to Moore's gift for engaging readers and expanding their realms of imagination.  Her writing dissects multitiered layers of regret.  "When people died it was the vanishing that was so hard."  And, we're reminded, "Memory. Passage.  Nothing in the world was ever truly over."  I strongly recommend this haunting and indelible novel.