Moore changes form with great impact in both “When My Father Was in Prison” and “Mother and Child,” two stories about children that cover time and space in block paragraphs and vastly different tones. The latter is an eerie, tension-wracked cautionary tale about the generational effects of mental illness and neglect, while the former is a close look into the mind of a child whose father is in prison, and the distractions and coping mechanisms he turns to, often to hilarious effect (an outburst of confused swearing delivers him the word “dicksuck,” a curse that becomes prescient when his brother’s own coping mechanisms are revealed). Though humor can be found throughout the collection, in the beautiful and empathetic human moments Moore is attuned to, no story made me cringe and laugh more than “With You or Without You,” where an awkward and depressed father still lusting after his dead first wife is so put off by his adult daughter and her ambitious business plans that he can’t help but blatantly insult her to her friends. His only saving grace is his overwhelming self-awareness:
What would that be like, to have everyone know at a glance what was wrong with you? Freeing. It would be freeing, but only if that were the way you’d always been. At this point Morley wouldn’t want everyone to know what was wrong with him, partly because what was wrong was unnameable.
The characters of Not Dead Yet are all coping with these unnameable maladies, these weaknesses that hold them back from living life rather than just reacting to it, from finding their purpose. In this exceptional debut collection, Moore gives the reader a cast of characters united in indecision, bound together by the mundane strangeness of their circumstances. What to make of this great endurance test of life? For these characters, the only solution is to wait and find out.