Customer Reviews

A Gate at the Stairs: A Novel

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(53)
1 star:		(49)

 

 

When Tassie's story starts, it is almost too convincing as a portrait of an aimless college girl. I say this because the aimless college years are probably only interesting in retrospect, and to the person who lived through them. So Tassie's stupid classes, unfocused yearnings and blanket rejection of all that is "old" are convincing, but not all that entertaining. This is the case throughout the entire book.

Where her life intersects with the household in which she will work as a nanny, the story moves and engages the reader. The process of private adoption, the sadness of birth mothers, the attachment the "help" develops for the child who is not hers, and the oblique observation of the marriage of your employer; so perfectly done. As perfectly done is the development of Tassie's romance with her mysterious Brazilian, the quiet way she discovers the joys of lovemaking, how she seeks out the passions of her own life on her employer's time, unaware that this is absolutely not right.

But things need to happen in a story, and as hilarious as Tassie and Sarah's conversations are, as oily and disgusting as Edward and his "hair cape" are, as painful as Tassie's plummet into unrequited love with Reynaldo is, when things happen here, they happen. Boom, boom, boom, Tassie is confronted with three great griefs all in a row. Where do you turn when everything in life disappoints you? Home, I guess.

There are things "wrong" with this book. Tassie's voice, though accurate, is at times allowed to veer into hectic, antic, as she talks too much and Moore lets her do that. She tosses off cynical natterings to the point where as i reader I almost didn't like her, because none of her cynicism was based on experience. Also, Moore needs to pick a simile. Even if they're all good, one metaphor per sentence is enough, and there are sentences, paragraphs and pages that are overstuffed and tiring due to metaphorical overload. And the insufferable Wednesday night meetings of racially mixed families; the first one was kind of funny, and enough, because it's painful to hear people go on like that. Were these giving voice or merely making a mockery? I couldn't tell and after the second meeting started, I skimmed. Much more effective is the accurate portrait of what it is like to be out and about with a child of another race, knowing that eyes are on you and conclusions are being reached about who and what you are in the first instant of a stranger's visual perception.

The pleasures of reading Lorrie Moore, her humor, her unmatched gift for metaphor and her painstaking rendition of human emotions, far outweigh any flaws in the book. The scene when Tassie finally eats at Sarah's restaurant is killingly funny and satisfying. But be warned that this is a very sad story, one that raises far more questions about its characters than it ever answers.

Like other reviewers I come to this novel as an admirer of Lorrie Moore's piquant short stories, which render with deftness and sympathy the oddness, pleasure, and pain of being human. All of Moore's strengths as a writer -- her ability to find just the right off-the-wall metaphor, her comic sidewise advance on the most painful experiences, her sardonic wit -- are on display here. But the space afforded her by the longer form appears to have reduced her vigilance in maintaining the economy and precision of her shorter fiction. Too much of a good thing is sometimes just too much.

There were long (they seemed long anyway) stretches in the novel where I wanted to say "OK, I get the point! These people are callow and self-absorbed." Or where I wished she had stopped after the first, or even the second, mind-bending metaphor for the same observation.

And then there is the plot, which hangs together only tenuously. Tassie at school and Tassie at home seem largely unconnected, and there are elements of suspense introduced that trail off into nothingness. Perhaps this could be explained as imitative of life, but it often seems to be gratuitous.

Tassie's family is eccentric, a pleasure we have come to expect from Moore, but too often these people come off as self-parodies. The early character development of Tassie's brother Robert is a caricature that doesn't really pave the way for the depth of grief that engulfs the end of the novel.

Tassie is an interesting character and an entertaining narrator, but her insouciance and diffidence distance us from her throughout, and we never really fully penetrate her self-protective shield. In the end I agree with the reviewer who said that Moore would be better served by leaving the undergraduate world behind and finding adult company.

You wait years for a Lorrie Moore book, then two appear out of the blue. Moore published her last story collection, Birds of America, ten years ago; her last novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, fifteen years ago. You know what to expect: small-town America seen with a quirky, poetic eye; a damaged female protagonist; wisecracks, and the howling gusts of sanity and humour. The inevitable blurb from Nick Hornby on the paperback will surely seal the deal. What, then, could possibly go wrong?

A lot, unfortunately. Virtually everyone agrees that Moore is a major talent. It's just that her talent has a default setting - the short story - and when she leaves it, the engine of her narrative stalls. It's a problem particular to short story writers of genius: Cheever and O. Henry both had it. The ties to the 'post 9/11 psyche' seem nebulous and tacked-on; the plot evaporates thirty-nine pages into the novel, and Moore has spun better silk out of similar material in her justly acclaimed story, 'You're Ugly, Too'. Moore deserves your attention, but not for this. Spend your hard-earned cash on her Collected Stories instead.

A version of the first chapter of Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" recently appeared as a short story in "The New Yorker," and on the strength of that, I was excited to read the whole novel. The protagonist, Tassie Keltjin, a young woman from a small town who is a freshman at a Midwestern university, is very appealing in her awkwardness, her wry comments on life, and her growing self-awareness. Moore has a sharp eye for the pretensions of a college town, such as the fraught "support group" conversations that ensue when Tassie's employer, Sarah Brink (a perfect surname you'll discover), adopts a bi-racial child. The parts of the novel that center on this adoption process and on Tassie's relationship with the child are the strongest in the novel. I also loved the account of Tassie's rather aimless, unsupported academic life (and the goofy courses she takes).

There are actually two narratives in "A Gate at the Stairs:" the first centers on Tassie's college life and the second on her home life. These two worlds do not intersect and the home narrative is much less successful. For reasons I couldn't fathom, Moore gives Tassie an unhappy Jewish mother who behaves oddly (she orders things online and never opens the boxes, for instance), although the reasons for her unhappiness are never divulged. I sensed that Moore was less comfortable with this material; the latke (potato pancake) frying scene was completely weird and wrong, for instance. (You don't grate potatoes the day before you make latkes, unless you enjoy fermentation and strange colors, and you certainly don't slap them together like a hamburger patty, as Tassie does.) The dad, an alternative-type farmer who grows heirloom potatoes for the kind of precious "gourmet" restaurant run by Sarah, is also unhappy, as is her brother, who escapes by joining the army. The Keltjins' hometown, with which they don't have much to do, is small in size and narrow-minded in outlook. None of this really hangs together the way the parts of the novel set in the college town do. It's stock parochial small town stuff, and it isn't improved at the end by the pastoral rhapsodies that Tassie indulges in after her life has taken a few strange turns, including a connection (rather unconvincing, I thought) to the post-9/11 world.

Moore is a good writer, and "A Gate by the Stairs" is definitely worth a read, particularly for its satirical send-up of the kind of college town where naive small town freshmen stumble into courses like "Soundtracks to War Movies" and where Tassie meets her PE requirement AND gets a humanities credit for "The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis." She finds out a lot about that, although not in class.

I have not read her other books, so I am reviewing "A Gate at the Stairs" as a complete Lorrie Moore newbie. In this book, celebrated author Lorrie Moore's style is very descriptive and tangential, and plot takes not just a back seat, but a way-way-back seat. At times, the plot is completely forgotten, buried in and between paragraphs that sometimes go for nearly a whole page, or even more than a page.

The plot -- young college student Tassie becomes a nanny for a couple who adopt a child -- seems to be a loose framework for the author's commentary, or her expression of the characters' inner lives, which in turn are devices for Moore to write about whatever she wants, since commentary and characters' thoughts can be about anything and everything.

For example, when the prospective nanny and the potential adoptive mother are riding home from a disappointing session with a potential birth mother, some authors may write, "Sarah's cell phone rang." Moore writes, "Sarah's cell phone played the beginning to "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," its vigorous twang not unlike a harpsichord at all, and so not completely offensive to the spirit of Mozart, who perhaps did not, like so many of his colleagues, have to roll about as much in his grave since the advent of electronic things."

Because Moore is a skillful writer, many readers may be willing to ride in Moore's way-way-back seat along with the plot to see how it all turns out, especially if they're snagged when about halfway through the book, a little post-911 terrorism fear leaks in.

Unfortunately, though, other readers (this includes me) may be turned off by those endless tangents, and by having to work so hard to unearth Moore's nuggets buried in the thoughts of the young student from a potato farm who has become a de facto mommy to another's child, and the brittle modern working mother who has turned daily care of her child over to another woman.

The themes and characters in this novel interested me. But the tangents were very tiresome, and I found it tough sledding indeed.

I read the whole thing, but it was tough going. I felt as if Moore had collected twists and turns of phrase over several years and then tried to push them into odd places in this one book. The language got in the way. It just didn't work. I love when a book offers language to be savored, even when the writing causes the reader to stop and ponder...as when you can say, "I loved the story, but I almost loved the language more." I just kept getting bogged down in Moore's attempts at cuteness, especially in the quirky dialogue. People can play off each other, but every single character, every single time they spoke? Moore seemed to be intent on incorporating all the plays on words that have ever come to her, perhaps despite her own better judgment or her editors'.

I loved the excerpt of this book that ran in The New Yorker. It turns out that the magazine cut about 50% of what that section contained. Too bad this kind of editing process wasn't applied to the book as a whole.

I'm on page 125. Very little has happened and as far as I can tell, nothing at all is at stake for the protagonist. Meanwhile, there is no end to peripheral, pointless commentary on the part of the narrator.

We are treated to countless musings like this: "What did it mean to have the shyest vinca in the world? It seemed sad but perhaps necessary, like the retirement of an aged ballerina."

Or, after her employer mentions hand-raked Norman sea salt: "So this is what Americans were busying themselves with in Normandy now that it had been liberated from the Nazis: hand-raking the sea salt. Soldiers' tears shipped thousands of miles and sprinkled on a fried leaf. Look D-Day in the eye and tell it that!"

Or, after the employer mentions a flavor of yogurt she loved as a child, now available only in Paris: "I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science."

I mean, come on. I found myself endlessly asking, "What the hell is she *talking* about???" Furthermore, this is supposed to be the voice of an unsophisticated, small-town farm kid.

All in all, the book is short on plot and tension and coherence, long on snarky self-indulgence. A disappointment sharpened all the more for having waited so long for Moore's latest and buying it in hardcover.

In his review of A Gate at the Stairs for the NY Times Book Review, Jonathan Lethem says, "I'm aware of one -- one -- reader who doesn't care for Lorrie Moore, and even that one seems a little apologetic about it."

Well, count me as the second reader in that category, and I'm not at all apologetic about it. Not yet, at least.

In this story of Tassie Keltjin, a college-age young woman who is hired as a nanny for the adopted bi-racial child of a wacky workaholic chef and her hapless husband, there is no way to connect to the emotional core of the book. The puns, the riffs, the word-plays, the literary sleight of hand -- it's all so showy and alienating. Every scene is rent apart with verbal or mental parries, often off-the-cuff and of dubious intent.

Here's one example from a seminal scene: "Susan, now once again completely twisted in her seat, the shotgun seat without the convenience of an actual shotgun, began to shout 'Turn! Turn! Turn!' To every thing there was a season." Without printing any spoilers, can I just tell you that shotguns and the Byrds have nothing to do with anything?

As if the author's literary attempts to juggle while tap-dancing and playing the flugelhorn weren't enough, she keeps upping the plot ante: a "quasi" Brazilian boyfriend, poisoning, shadowy terrorists, an adult flapping around in a hawk costume, and a long-distance scooter journey, all topped off by an unfortunate coffin incident.

My other big problem is that although Tassie is awash with witty inner dialog -- which is odd given her upbringing as a conventionally schooled farm girl -- she is virtually monosyllabic. She is fatally boring and unbelievable, especially in her penchant for playing the electric guitar.

It's a shame, because the author writes some truly arresting passages, like this one: "I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up."

I'm thinking maybe I should read Lorrie Moore's collections of short stories (Birds of America, Self-Help, Like Life), or some of her pieces from The New Yorker. I suspect they might move me over to the fan column.

It's not that the story in "Gate at the Stairs" is uninteresting; it's just that Moore's writing style gets in the way. This author never met a simile or metaphor she didn't like. Consequently, her paragraphs are over-stuffed with them. It is as if she has to constantly show off to her reader, to prove how clever with words she is. She should have murdered a lot more of her darlings before they ended up cluttering the pages of the novel.

The main character goes through a lot in the aftermath of 9/11, but I found myself much less sympathetic to her than to the little girl, Mary-Emma, who is A Gate at the Stairsat the heart of the story. People have said the Moore's short stories are better; perhaps I will try one. But I cannot recommend this novel.

What is wrong with star literature writing today? No, worse...what is wrong with star literature READERS today? The emperor is truly naked, truly, and yet platoons of zombie soccer moms (5-star reviewers)and clubby intellectual cronies (Joanthan Lethem) swear his robe is the most beautiful they've ever witnessed. The robe, of course, is Moore's book which, at 320 pages, is the perfect length for a short story if an editor could get it down to 20 pages. Am I the only person on this review board who noticed that virtually NOTHING happened in this book for hundreds of pages of botanical prose? Is plot totally dead in America? Are we, to borrow from Moore's academic (and yet, to her way of thinking, post-academic) tongue, post-plot? Is she teaching, at Wisconsin, the aspiring writer of tomorrow that mood and evocation and metaphor and suggestiveness and voice are what matters? Don't worry, you don't need to acually WEAR clothing...just FEEL it; THINK about it, and you'll look great. What I FELT when I finished this book, besides cheated of my time, is that Moore committed to a first-person narrative but foolishly bestowed that responsibility on an unfit narrator. Tassie, the narrator, was alternatingly clueless about the world around her and peceptive to such a preocious degree that it just wasn't believeable. The biggest problem, though, was that Tassie was a monstrous bore. She was snarky and sarcastic and cute at times and yes I'd enjoy ordering a coffee at Starbucks from her, but after 2 minutes I would have fled the store faster than the Terrorist fled the US. Give me Richard Price, give me Richard Ford, give me Richard Russo--give me anybody named Richard with a pen and piece of paper over...this.