SOURCE: Urquhart, James. “Dysfunctional Sitcoms.” New Statesman 128, no. 4418 (8 January 1999): 58.

In the following review, Urquhart lauds the writing in Birds of America, commending Moore's ability to capture awkward situations realistically and her ability to portray adults looking back on their lost childhood.

Lorrie Moore's new collection of stories [Birds of America] comprises a dozen punchy diatribes, laments and elegies to crumbling lives or broken relationships, all taut within the disciplines of the form. Only “What You Want to Do Fine” betrays any slack in the wire of Moore's concentration; it lacks the restraining architecture of the short story form and wanders lost in its own landscape, as though excerpted from a longer, absent work.

Moore writes well about childhood, searching for the innocent key that might unlock the wisdoms that supposedly arrive with age. In “Two Boys”, a story from her previous collection Like Life, she writes of the...