A GATE AT THE STAIRS: How Lorrie Moore’s novel functions like a collection

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, Knopf, New York, 2009, $25.95

More than a decade after the release of her best-selling short story collection Birds of America, Lorrie Moore’s third novel, A Gate at the Stairs, follows Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of an eccentric farming family. Her life is split between the fictional Wisconsin towns of rural Dellacrosse, where she was raised, and Troy, the town in which she attends college. Tassie’s narrative picks up in the months after 9/11—a context which complicates the already overwhelming task of adjusting to life in liberal Troy after having been brought up by a farmer whose primary concerns were raising fussy breeds of potatoes and a mother of “indeterminate ethnicity who slept too late for a farmer’s wife and did not keep herself busy enough with chores.” A few months into the school year, Tassie takes a job as a nanny for the Thornwood-Brinks, an upper middle-class couple that adopts a half African-American two-year-old girl, Mary-Emma (an excerpt of the novel regarding this section of the narrative was excerpted in the July 6th issue of The New Yorker.) Meanwhile, Tassie takes up with Reynaldo, a charismatic and mysterious (and, as it turns out, Muslim) young man. Back home, Tassie’s younger brother Robert considers enlisting in the army—for a Dellacrosse boy, it’s either that or trucking school—and ultimately decides to join up.

A coming-of-age novel that takes place in the Midwest post 9/11 may not sound particularly enticing, especially to someone unfamiliar with Moore’s work. In the same way that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, despite the deftness of prose, felt like a bit of an emotional cheap shot as it chronicled a boy’s search for answers after his father dies in the attack, such was my concern with Gate. And it’s true that the context seems to bear down on the novel at times—revealing the fact that Reynaldo is Muslim wasn’t a spoiler; the reader sees it coming long before Tassie does, and Robert’s enlisting in the army as a result of aimlessness combined with predatory recruiting is painful to read, in large part because it’s so familiar a story. Despite the fact that almost eight years have passed between 9/11 and the release of Gate, that particular subject matter still feels raw—whether it’s a lack of perspective on behalf of the reader or of the author, there’s a feeling of forcedness that novel doesn’t fully transcend.

That being said, the other aspects of the narrative—namely, the story of Tassie’s life intersecting with the Thornwood-Brinks, and the Thornwood-Brinks attempting to facilitate an adopted bi-racial child—maintains the brilliance that has rightfully earned Moore a place among the most important contemporary authors. Tassie is a classic Moore leading lady; clever and displaced, her neo-farmer’s daughter upbringing makes for some terrifically funny observations:

My roommate, Murph, had done all the dating and had essentially abandoned me so that she could now sleep every night with this new guy she’d met. She had bequeathed me her vibrator, a strange swirling, buzzing thing that when switched to high gyrated in the air like someone’s bored thick finger going whoop-de-doo. Whose penis could this possibly resemble?

The crux of the story, however, is the relationship that develops between Sarah Brink, the adoptive mother who is the owner and executive chef of an upscale restaurant, and Tassie. It is the most subtle and interesting in the book, and is proof of Moore’s remarkable ability to capture the vacillation between empathy and discord, repulsion and affection:

When I glanced over at her, driving without her sunglasses, her scarf wrapped now around her head like a babushka, she seemed watery, far away, lost in thought, and I wondered how a nice, attractive girl—for I’d thought I had glimpsed on the way up the girl I imagined she once was, her face still and thoughtful her hair in the sun ablaze with light—how a girl like that became a lonely woman with a yarny shmatte on her head, became this, whatever it was. After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed…These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

That this relationship is the most fascinating part of Gate seems natural; here, Moore is moving in the world populated by the brilliant stories of Self-Help and Birds of America, where wit and irony converge in small, devastating moments:

We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stengel sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

If A Gate at the Stairs pales in comparison to Moore’s short story collections, it’s partly because the best parts of the novel are reminiscent of those collections, and where it strays, it feels cumbersome by contrast. Despite soft spots in the structure, however, Moore’s expert handle on language and subtlety that has established her as one of the eminent writers of the last few decades is present throughout the 322 pages, and the novel reaffirms her rare talent for humor that results in poignancy.

By Deena Drewis