SOURCE: Fleming, Juliet. “Deer in the Headlights.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4987 (30 October 1998): 27.

In the following review, Fleming comments on the stories in Birds of America, faulting Moore for “curiously unhoned” writing and the abundance of meaningless jokes, puns, and wordplay in her fiction.

Birds of America, Lorrie Moore's third collection of short stories, has been widely praised in the United States as representing the coming-of-age of one of the country's “most brilliant” writers. Set in the American Midwest, ten of the twelve stories are concerned with the small triumphs and larger despairs of a series of female protagonists, women whose objects of love are themselves, a child, the past, a cat, a briefly glimpsed visiting lecturer or a patronized husband (happily married Therese is having an affair with an assistant DA: “It is nothing, except that it is sex with a man who is not dyslexic, and once...