Racism still exists, but it has changed its face. Using the adoption of a black girl by a white couple as a revealer, American novelist and short story writer Lorrie Moore writes a great novel of disillusionment.
Lorrie Moore is one of those Americans who will not be led to believe that the election of a black president has once and for all resolved the issue of racial division in the United States.
In the hotel in the 14th arrondissement of Paris where we meet her, the writer, who oscillates between a cool boho look and a disciplined hairstyle, chants the beginning of “I have a Dream” : “Martin Luther King’s speech may be magnificent, but it is completely outdated. Who today can speak of a collective dream that would cancel the principle of race?”
Since the publication of her first collection of short stories in 1985, Lorrie Moore has made a specialty of unmasking the pretenses lurking in American society. Cruel Lives explored in nine stories a feminine condition corseted by neuroses and falsely liberated. Published five years later – Moore produced rather sparingly, four collections and three novels in twenty-five years –, Stories for Nothing ironized on a handful of existences guided by practical life manuals.
Associated at the time with the young authors of the Brat Pack
represented by Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, Lorrie Moore nevertheless claims to be less “sex, drugs and rock’n’ roll” than deeply moralistic. And it is not her new work that will contradict her.
By dressing up as a coming-of-age novel, La Passerelle brings back into fashion some great humanist principles such as egalitarianism, integration and diversity, which seem to have gathered dust in recent years. Such an escalation cannot be undertaken bare-handed. This is probably why it took the 53-year-old writer four years to write her novel.
At first glance, The Bridge presents itself as a portrait of a young Midwestern girl
Tessie, who comes to the city to attend college: “I wanted a young heroine because I sincerely believe that 20-year-olds are the most intelligent creatures in the world.”
Alongside the coming-of-age novel, a picture of the Midwest, its low suns and its nature in bloom, is sketched by the novelist who has lived and taught there for twenty-six years: “We don’t write enough about the American countryside anymore. It seemed important to me to capture this natural world as well as its art of living and farming: we must not forget that the Midwest is America’s refrigerator!”
The daughter of potato farmers, the heroine discovers at college a world that is the opposite of her own, ranging from “Henry James’ masturbatory practice of the comma” to the discovery of the water-pad bra. Her education becomes more complicated when she takes on the role of babysitter for a white couple about to adopt a black child.
Anguish for Tessie, who will go through all the degrees of ordinary racism – a novelistic lever for Moore who thus reaches the heart of his subject: “Adoption did not only provide a theme with enormous dramatic potential. It also made possible extraordinary collusions of universes and social classes.”
Through the human and administrative difficulties encountered by the couple
their wandering through adoption services, and other obsessions soon emerge: religious beliefs, communitarianism, interracial conflicts, poverty – all the problems that shake America today.
Observed not as a specific phenomenon but as a symptom, the reason for adoption reveals the commodification of the world pushed to the human being: “Adoption is a business. One day, I heard an anecdote that stunned me: a couple had adopted a child and returned him after a few months!”
Lorrie Moore continues with crudeness
“White children are preferred to children of color; to apologize for their choice, adoptive parents say: oh, but it’s very difficult to raise a child in a mixed family. It’s not fulfilling for him, blah blah blah…”
For the novelist, racism still exists but it has changed its face. In this sense, she evokes what is called racial blindness – according to her, a form of hypocrisy: “It is a so-called progressive idea, according to which we are supposed not to give importance to the race of each person. We pretend not to see if someone is white or black. After the election of Barack Obama, this idea became very fashionable. Except that even he does not think that we can ignore the community from which we come! When you are African-American, you know very well that all this is a myth.”
A myth, a disillusionment in the same way that this comedy of happiness played by the student’s host family will ultimately be. Because at the end of Tessie’s journey towards knowing herself and the world, Lorrie Moore essentially shows how it is first of all a question of unlearning for her heroine: not letting herself be locked in her seductive images, going beyond her smooth surface – where a model bobo couple reveals itself under a criminal face and where the idyllic scenario of an adoption turns into a neurotic and cowardly destiny.
When all the masks have fallen, when the heroine has completed her education – that is to say, “acquired enough contradictions to approach life” –, when she has traveled this “bridge” almost in its entirety, we will realize that in fact, in terms of a coming-of-age novel, we have just witnessed its exact opposite: the story of a disenchantment, of a Fitzgeraldian deconstruction of the world.
