SOURCE: Stabile, Carole. Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore. Belles Lettres 11, no. 1 (January 1996): 45-6.

In the following review, Stabile praises the poignancy and power in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, lauding Moore's ability to depict the sense of nostalgia and wistfulness that adults feel when examining their earlier lives.

“Things,” Lorrie Moore tells us in her second novel [Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?], “stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before.” For Berie Carr, visiting Paris with her husband, Daniel, memory possesses a richness—a fertility—that throws the present into shadowy relief. Daniel is attending a medical conference on Tay-Sachs, a disease for which both he and Berie carry the gene. She is, as she puts it, “safe” in a predictable life that holds little hope for surprise, adventure, or even pain.

The summer of 1972 unfolds against...