Hyperrealism In Degrees Of Nakedness By Lisa Moore

“The top half of Joan’s house caught fire and burned while she slept downstairs. The microwave and television melted into lumps as smooth and shiny as beach rocks. She woke up to make herself a cup of tea in the morning and when she got upstairs everything was black.”(pg. 50) The first line of Lisa Moore’s hyperreal short story from “Degrees of Nakedness”, exposes the vulnerability of Joan’s house reflecting the resident inside; how the resting nature of mild-mannered people can be burning upstairs, ready to collapse at any moment. This intriguing intensity built by Moore is something that is not easily described or shown, but engendered through presence and self-wrought hyperrealism. She has a way of hinging powerful insights in a dramatized single image, gesture, or moment like a pulsating narrative compression framework. The interworking’s of the restrained prose, and the character’s psychological complexity, exemplifies intense significance beyond the

Joan and her sister-in-law are as different in their psyche as the steps they take. During Joan’s house burning, she saw “Her greenish gold footsteps [as] the only color in the room. It reminded her of Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City” (50). There was no exposition on the contents of her life engulfed in flame. There’s a sense of calamity amidst the intensity. She saw the path to epiphany and revelation in the wake of her destruction. When Mike’s wife is walking through the tarnished house of the lesbian, she notes all the smashed entities, and spilled contents of the fridge. This is profoundly strange to her. “Broken glass covers the concrete steps. Inside, the plush carpet crunches with every step. I can’t believe how much damage there is. I think about the kind of rage it would take to sustain this much damage. I think about the damage the fire caused Joan’s house. I feel very tired.”