From the Publisher
"The admired fiction writer Lorrie Moore has a unique gift. She can be screamingly funny—and in the very next paragraph, able to convey terrible grief. . . Her language is dazzling." —Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY "[A GATE AT THE STAIRS] is a gift." —Philadelphia Inquirer ". . . this is the kind of book that sneaks up on you: Moore charms with her humor and knack for the small but telling detail, slowly builds a sense of investment in her frustratingly passive protagonist, then unleashes an unexpected emotional wallop at the end." —Patrick Condon, Associated Press
"Moore's penetrating and singular voice as a writer is one I could listen to for years and years." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Moore is such a bright, witty writer. . . A Gate at the Stairs is Moore's first novel in 15 years, which means a whole generation of readers has grown up thinking of her only as one of the country's best short-story writers. Get ready to expand your sense of what she—and a novel—can do. . . what's so endearing is Moore's ability to tempt us with humor into the surreal boundaries of human experience, those strange decisions that make no sense out of context, the things we can't believe anyone would do. The novel's climax takes us right into the disorienting logic of grief for a scene that's both horrifying and tender, a grotesque violation of taboos that's entirely forgivable and heartbreaking."
—Ron Charles,The Washington Post "A powerful, compassionate novel, both funny and tragic, and always beautifully told."—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek "Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows. . . This book plumbs deep because it is anchored deep. . . On finishing A Gate at the Stairs I turned to the reader nearest to me and made me swear to read it immediately." —Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review (cover review) "A Gate at the Stairs has the power to make you laugh and cry, sometimes almost simultaneously, and its wonderful, heartbreaking conclusion reminds us that no matter how we suffer, we still can reach a peculiarly human state of grace."
—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald "Her most powerful book yet. . . An indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11. . . The novel explores, with enormous emotional precision, the limitations and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families. . . Most memorably, in this haunting novel Ms. Moore gives us stark, melancholy glimpses into her characters' hearts, mapping their fears and disappointments, their hidden yearnings and their more evanescent efforts to hold on to their dreams in the face of unfurling misfortune."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore."
—Jonathan Dee, Harper's Magazine
"With dizzying wit and acute intelligence, Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs features a Midwestern coed turned part-time nanny drawn into the full-time drama of a family who all demand babysitting."
—Vanity Fair
"The ending of this book is a miracle of lyric force, beautiful and beautifully constructed, with a comic touch that transforms itself to a kind of harrowing precision. With great writers this precision is achieved with such irregular tools as voice and convictions and social gestures, reacting to circumstances and events–or better, as Lorrie Moore shows us in this fine book–to the mysteries of love, agony, and grace."
—Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine
"Heroine Tassie's wit and bruisable heart makes this novel refreshingly real."
—Good Housekeeping
"A fiction writer with as fine a bead on contemporary life and relationships and absurdity as anyone writing today. . .startling, painful, funny, universal true observations about life's closely intertwined stings and salvations. . ."
—Louisa Kamps, Elle magazine
"Moore cannot write a bad sentence, cannot create poor characters, cannot tell flat, ho-hum stories. When she's good, she's very, very good; when she's bad, she's good."
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"A Gate at the Stairs is hilarious and distressing, entertaining and wise, and further proof that Lorrie Moore is one of the very best American writers working today. I wish she was Irish."
—Roddy Doyle
"Contemporary fiction has produced few noticers with a better eye and more engaging voice than Tassie Keltjin, the narrator of Lorrie Moore's deceptively powerful A Gate at the Stairs. For much of Moore's first novel in 15 years–her short stories have established her as something of a Stateside Alice Munro–Tassie's eye and ear are pretty much all there is to the book. . . The enrichment of such complications makes this one of the year's best novels. . ."
—Don McLeese, Kirkus Reviews (featured review)
"[A] luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel. . . Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy. . . generous flashes of wit endow this stellar novel with great heart."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The unique vision and exquisite writing cast a spell."
—Booklist (starred)
The Barnes & Noble Review
In a recent talk, Lorrie Moore suggested that 20 is "the universal age of passion" -- the point at which the unique shape and expression of our feelings like love and disgust and fury becomes fixed. It is also, she observed, the perceptual halfway point of most people's existence. Our first two decades seem to pass as slowly as the whole of the rest of our lives, according to scientists, so that our early experiences carry vastly more psychic weight than those of adulthood.
It's interesting to consider the impact of Moore's own work by this metric, and not only because A Gate at the Stairs is narrated by a 20-year-old. Since the publication of her first collection, Self-Help, in 1985, so many readers have identified with Moore's witty, cynical, and yearning failed-relationship stories at a similarly impressionable stage that her writing has become as formative an influence on American fiction as her hero John Updike's was in an earlier era.
Self-Help, the young depressive's answer to the dating manual, was my first exposure to Moore. In this debut story collection, which Knopf snapped up when the author was just 26, the characters cheat or are cheated on; they are phoned by married lovers at pointless office jobs; they "make attempts at less restrictive arrangements," only to "watch them sputter and deflate like balloons." Reading the book back in college, my friends and I felt as if someone had distilled the essence of our own bad decisions and aimlessness into a terrible and irrefutable prediction that we would spend the rest of our days making the same mistakes we already had, only more so. Moore's instructional second-person narration and knowing wisecracks leant her prose an aura of authority. Relationships are futile and hazardous no matter which way you go about them, Self-Help seemed to say, but you're not going to give them up, so you may as well just gird yourself with dread, and soldier on. Subsequent works, which I read in quick succession, induced to a lesser degree the same feeling of witnessing my own future car wreck.
When Moore's Birds of America appeared in 1998, however, I was thrown. Although precisely observed and often moving, the stories lacked the galvanizing concision of her earlier fiction. The humor was more acutely sardonic than ever, but -- especially in "People like That Are the Only People Here," an astonishing story set in a children's cancer ward -- slowed by a new kind of bitterness and a wrenching, very adult pain that I couldn't fully access and wasn't sure I wanted to.
Before reading this long-awaited novel, though, I went back through Moore's body of work and was amazed to discover that many of the stories in Self-Help now seem tinny and monotonous, and some actually grate. In part this is due to their familiarity; returning to the characters and their predicatments after so many years is like beaming directly into to the mind of my 20-year-old self (The fact that lesser imitators have drained the second person of freshness doesn't help.) By contrast, Birds of America, Like Life, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? revealed themselves as stronger works -- deeper and more cohesive in their particular blend of anger, hopelessness, and nostalgia.
A Gate at the Stairs, Moore's first book in 11 years, is set in a midwestern university community in the months following 9/11. While it engages with familiar themes -- deception, boredom, and failure in love; the laziness of youth; the cluelessness of parents -- it also represents a significant departure for Moore, both in scope and tone, from what has preceded it. The novel is far more overtly political than her prior fiction, contemplating racism, fundamentalism, war, and liberal hypocrisy.
In the opening pages, Tassie, a college student and small-town farmer's daughter, revels in the electrifying uselessness of undergraduate study: "My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week a young professor named Thad... stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James' masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie."
Tassie has already handed in her final papers and plans to spend winter break looking for work. Although she interviews for nanny positions with one "fortyish pregnant woman after another," there are no call-backs until she meets with Sarah, a restaurateur who coincidentally buys potatoes from Tassie's father. Tassie is surprised to hear her dad's rarified produce spoken of approvingly; back home, the locals disdain his small operation, viewing him as a "hobbyist," a "vaguely contemptuous character, very out-of-town," even more ridiculous than the despised ginseng growers.
Sarah and her husband are trying to adopt, and she calls that very night to offer Tassie a job. Moore immediately sets up the tensions and affinities between Tassie and her new boss. "[E]ven once she had a baby," Tassie observes, Sarah "would never be able to shake the Auntie Mame quality from her mothering. There were worse things, I supposed." The bumper stickers on the back of her car -- "PERHAPS YOU WOULD DRIVE BETTER WITH THAT CELL PHONE SHOVED UP YOUR ASS" and "IF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH BURNING BUSHES, LET'S BURN BUSH AND LISTEN TO WHAT GOD SAYS." -- add pointed confirmation.
The first prospective adoptee doesn't work out, but Sarah eventually manages to get her hands on a toddler, a beautiful, friendly mixed-race child. She renames the little girl Mary-Emma (but calls her Emmie), bakes picture books from the library "to get rid of the germs," and, to supplement the baby food, arranges to have risotto Fed-Exed home from her restaurant. After a teenager shouts the n-word at Emmie from his speeding car, Sarah starts a Wednesday-night support group for parents of mixed-race children. Tassie overhears their talks from her perch up in the nursery with the kids:
"Racial blindness is a white idea." This would be Sarah.
"How dare we think of ourselves as a social experiment?"
"How dare we not?"
"I'm in despair."
"Despair is mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small....
The opinions downstairs were put forth with such emphasis and confidence, it all sounded like an orchestra made up entirely of percussion....
Every time a meeting convenes, the dialogue continues for pages, but the participants are barely, if at all, distinguished.
At its best, Moore's uncanny dexterity for dipping into the flow of language -- for detaching conversations from characters' back-stories and evoking the realities of how people talk to one another -- fosters a sense of universality. After all, people really do misspeak, antagonize, and confuse. They air anxieties and grievances they had meant to suppress and then try to dispel the resulting awkwardness with bad jokes. Yet the profusion of clever repartee in fiction can erode the reader's sense of the characters as individual people worth investing in. Tassie is strangely jaded and politically informed for a girl with her background, and her rendition of events occasionally suffers from a satirical quality that threatens to undermine the realism and emotional resonance of the book.
When eventually it becomes clear that the adoption is in jeopardy, the plot takes on an urgency reminiscent of a good crime novel. Mysteries pile up: why is Sarah suddenly so dispassionate; who calls the house all day and hangs up; is Tassie's boyfriend somehow related to the person who drives by at strange times, music blaring? The hollowness of Sarah's liberalism is expertly exposed, and Moore's fusion of heartbreak and satire reaches alchemical perfection as the now-bourgie Emmie cries "Ciao, Mama! Ciao, Mama!" from the window of a departing car.
While Tassie's relationships with Sarah and Emmie are genuine and complex, forming the heart of A Gate at the Stairs, the novel's many subplots engage less fully and often fail to convince. There is the gorgeous, lying boyfriend whose zealotry, racism, and exit don't feel supported by what has come before. There is the absent roommate, who is more remarkable missing than when she finally turns up. And there are Tassie's parents and brother, who seem, until tragedy wrenches them into focus toward the book's end, to exist largely as background..
For all the evidence supporting Moore's claims about the shape of our passions at 20, this latest book belies her argument that they become fixed. While deception in love often serves as her early works' raison d'etre, here it detracts. Tassie's lover is not sufficiently particularized to hold our attention as a character, and her feelings toward him are too ill-defined for us to empathize with her grief. Through the peripheral story lines and the one-liners, it's the fate of Emmie that resonates. A Gate at the Stairs is, fundamentally, about the lies people -- especially well-meaning ones -- tell themselves. --Maud Newton
Maud Newton's writing has appeared in numerous publications. Her blog is at maudnewton.com.
