SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “The Way We Live Now.” Spectator 281, no. 8881 (24 October 1998): 46-7.

In the following review, Brookner praises the narrative skill and characterizations displayed in Birds of America, calling the stories “convincing and disturbing.”

In Hollywood films of the late 1940s and 1950s there was always a substantial role for the heroine's girlfriend who was wacky and wry enough to offset the languishing love affair in the foreground. (I believe this role was pioneered by Henrietta Stacpole in The Portrait of a Lady.) [In Birds of America] Lorrie Moore's voice is that of the heroine's girlfriend, droll, hardworking, and marked down for a second best. There is nothing wrong with this: the disabused onlooker sees most of the game, but only if she is wide awake and a participant in the greater confusion.

Moore's protagonists, generally but not always women, are travelling, sometimes literally, towards an unknown destination...