Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

"In the Lorrie Moore, the central character has got married, she’s with her husband now and so from the outside that’s all right and proper. But actually there’s a distance between her and her husband and she’s very much hankering for the past and for the intensity of this relationship with a friend that she had that’s never been bettered and that she can’t replicate. Is that because we lose innocence? Is that because we lose hope? Or is it because we lose the capacity to connect that deeply once we become jaded, or a bit world-worn? Or we think more about ourselves, or we focus on other things—like our career—or we start worrying about money? All these other things come in that take us away from our most primal urges. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I love Lorrie Moore. She’s very well-known in America, more so than in the UK, sadly, but that’s changing. She’s primarily known for short stories, of which she is a master. This is her second novel. It’s about a woman—Berie—who’s on holiday in Paris—she’s from upstate New York—with her husband Daniel. It’s not a great relationship, it’s not a great marriage. He’s pushed her down the stairs a few weeks prior to their holiday and she’s hurt her hip. She’s not happy. There’s a distance between them, and it’s this distance that allows her mind to move to the past and to think about this friendship she had as an adolescent with a girl called Sils. They were working together at an amusement park called Storyland. While they were there they rescued frogs from horrible teenage boys—hence the title, which also comes from a painting by Nancy Mladenoff. But then Sils starts dating Mike, who has a motorcycle, and she gets pregnant and distance comes between them, and their friendship is essentially ruined by this. Then Berie goes to boarding school and does very well academically, which surprises her. Their lives grow apart. There’s a High-School reunion, but by then there is too much distance between them. They’ve lost that initial connection. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Since then Berie has experienced a whole load of shit at the hands of people, and the world, and a man, and has become a different person. She has shut down part of herself. She tries to make friends with a woman in Paris—an artist called Marguerite—because she’s craving intimacy so much, and craving that connection. But she just can’t do it. There’s a real sense of loss there. It’s about these two timelines and the gap between them, and this sense of tragedy and intensity that comes from having a very close adolescent friendship. One of the reasons I love Lorrie Moore so much, is that she really captures the way people think, which is a major goal for me. She can really get inside the heads of her characters. I think that sense of rivalry is key to all of these relationships, that sense of competition and of battle. Firstly jostling for each other’s attention, then for who has the upper hand in the relationship. That doesn’t go away, then sooner or later one of them is going to be given something by society—a job, academic success, a husband—that gives them status that the other one doesn’t have. It’s like the Morrisey line “We hate it when our friends become successful,” there’s that sense of betrayal when someone hasn’t stayed down with you. It’s especially compounded when you think their movement upwards is through a false, socially constructed strata."