Between Bark and her last short story collection, Birds of America (1998), there has been less a transformation or maturation than a very subtle recalibration. If Moore’s preoccupations have shifted at all, then it is as a singer’s tessitura changes with age. Her characters have grown up with her: the protagonists of Bark are almost all resolutely middle-aged. Their problems are ones familiar from the previous books – sex, love, families, madness, illness, loneliness – but the fact that these people are that little bit older means their stories catch a more autumnal inflection. As Kit in ‘Paper Losses’ notes, ‘time was essentially a comic thing’ but ‘constraints upon it force it to tragedy, or at least to misery’. For example, dating, something most of them do reluctantly but needily, is a much more wretched enterprise the second time around: Ira in ‘Debarking’ struggles to find ‘the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip Van Winkle’ with Zora; Bake fears the loss of Suzy and ‘an endgame of geriatric speed dating – everyone deaf and looking identical’ in ‘Foes’.

Moore’s stories have always been interested in exploring the hold children have over their parents – see the cancer story ‘People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’ in Birds of America – but the teenagers in Bark really cramp their parents’ style. The sixteen-year-old boy in ‘Referential’, ‘deranged’ and demanding, drives his mother and stepfather apart. In ‘Debarking’, Zora’s over-intimate relationship with her moody son Bruno makes Ira feel like the third wheel: he has to eat ‘Bruny’s’ favourite food (‘spring spaghetti’), watch his choice of movies (Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson) and keep displays of physical affection to a minimum (‘Bruny doesn’t like to see that sort of thing’). In ‘Thank You for Having Me’, the unnamed narrator reminisces about the day her husband walked out on her and their daughter. He tells her, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’ Unconvinced she asks, ‘Are you on crack?’ Although this woman’s relationship with fifteen-year-old Nickie appears to be rather good, she has this to say about parenting a little later on: ‘Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.’

A further shadow in Bark is cast by the decision to set nearly every story explicitly in post-9/11 America. Moore adores wordplay, so she will forgive me: there’s no beating about the Bushes. In ‘Subject to Search’, for instance, the life of Tom, a consultant for the US military who had a close childhood friend die on Mohammed Atta’s plane, is destroyed utterly by the realisation of his unwitting involvement in the notorious events at Abu Ghraib prison. In other stories, America’s wars in places seemingly at a safe distance break and enter into the consciousnesses of their characters. With the US-led coalition poised for invasion, Ira wishes for a ‘less military’-sounding name for the month of March and makes the case for a stiff drink now and then on the basis that ‘that’s what started this whole Iraq thing to begin with: it’s a war of teetotalers’.

The insistent political account-keeping – also a feature of her novel A Gate at the Stairs (2009) – adds an extra dimension to Moore’s long-running guerrilla insurgency against the American Dream. She has been particularly relentless in her attacks on the unreality of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ idea. This inalienable American right – the constitution says so – is annulled in her stories by the larger human truth that, as Kit in ‘Foes’ puts it, the most one can hope for is to choose one’s ‘best unhappiness’. Matter tends toward decay, bad things happen to good people, ‘a soccer mom becomes a rhododendron with a plaque’. To live long enough is to learn all this, and Bark is populated with characters who have. Dancers lose arms in car accidents. The ‘evil lobbyist’ has fake nails and an Asian-looking face because she was the victim of a terrorist bombing. Women get haircuts not because they have become unkempt, but because they want somebody – anybody – to touch them. Moore’s characters are glass half-empty types. Milton Theale in ‘Wings’ says, ‘I don’t even buy green bananas. That’s investing with reckless hope in the future.’ When Nickie’s mother in ‘Thank You for Having Me’ sees pastel bridesmaids’ dresses, she sees colours of pills: ‘one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam.’ Kit notices the gap in a massage-table headpiece and sees ‘a little drainpipe for crying’.

But there is that irrepressible linguistic exuberance mentioned earlier. Moore might make her characters notice a wad of cow dung at a wedding, but she ensures they make language its own amusement park too. Care is taken to find the perfect word or comparison: a finger is described as swelling ‘doughily’ around a jilted man’s wedding finger; a dying spider plant is likened to ‘Bob Marley on chemo’; the peanut allergy table at school is called ‘the cafeteria version of The Magic Mountain’. Characters pun, rhyme, and wisecrack; when KC in ‘Wings’ is asked what she thinks of Tom Waits, she quips, ‘You shouldn’t have to wear goggles and a hard hat when listening to music.’ No matter how sick or mad or depressed or old or dumb, they are never too far gone to fail to notice, as KC does, the unfortunate proximity of these two signs: ‘HOSPICE CARE: IT’S NEVER TOO SOON TO CALL’ and ‘PASS WITH CARE’. ‘There were jokes told in the concentration camps in Germany’, Moore has pointed out in interviews. Words offer a salve, if not a solution. Moore bites but she never barks.