See What Can Be Done review: Lorrie Moore's personal and idiosyncratic essays

Personal and idiosyncratic is precisely what makes Moore's reputation watertight in the world of English arts and letters. There is no one like her, although Virginia Woolf in her own idiosyncratic literary and cultural journalism could be an intimate friend. There is the same ranging intelligence, intuition about mood rather than reason, the sometimes whacky learning. And there is that genius for silliness. Or fancy.

There are few writers who get away with this and it has to do with them being entirely themselves and entirely at ease with every nuance of self in language. Given a book, or a concert to review, or a subject (Hillary Clinton 2016) Moore starts spooling-out that tranquil gaze – she seems to have lived by Henry James' mantra "Be one of those on whom nothing is wasted" – across the subject and begins to write.

What happens then is something sharp and funny. Her opening for a piece about John Cheever for instance: "Literature, when it is occurring, is the correspondence of two agoraphobics." Hooray. Or this observation in a piece about Dawn Powell: "The vices of small-town gossip, she felt, quite rightly, were virtues in a writer."

Moore must have been one of the first writers to drop pop culture references into grave and sometimes self-regarding mags such as The NYRB without the ironic self-congratulatory swagger or snobbish buff-of-the-nails. She always sees the point before anyone else and, endearingly, isn't afraid to appear lowbrow, probably because she's about as highbrow as you get.

Here is her take on James Cameron's Titanic: "What is to be most appreciated about Titanic has little to do with its poster boy Leonard DiCaprio, though he is a brilliant actor for someone carrying on with Mariel Hemingway's face and such a thin, awkwardly-pitched voice…"

Her intoxication with The Wire led to her asking Bob Silvers if she could write something on that for him. Silvers, ignorant of the subject but like all great editors trusting the taste, and vision of his writer, was eager for the piece. Moore's cultural responses became featured. Her 2017 article about her longtime infatuation with Stephen Stills is an exact piece of writing about the rightness of fandom for the right musician. Moore reveals herself here as both tenderhearted and scholarly.

Any collection of a lifetime's writing can't please everyone despite the certainty that every piece will have least one worthwhile line. Only comedy, iPhones and sex date faster than book reviews.

Three reviews of Alice Munro's work is two too many for those who do not share Moore's veneration for Munro, and some of the earlier pieces are now nearly 40 years old. Is Norah Ephron still of general interest? Other reviews are obscure.

Cultural responses are a reminder that to see the writer in timeless mode a reader needs to go to the fiction. Lorrie Moore deserves every accolade, every kiss dropped on her natty shoes but to see the radiance of her mind and the wildness of her view why not pick up one of her collections of short stories, or that flawless novel A Gate at the Stairs.