A Gate at the Stairs

Book five of the New York Times Ten Best of 2009 is Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs. I am a long-time Lorrie Moore admirer, going back twenty-five years when I read her fresh, sparkling collection of short stories Self-Help. I was so enamored of her that I pinned a picture of her, cut out of the newspaper, to the cloth wall of my cubicle at work. In the years since I've read just about everything she's written.

Moore specializes as a short-story writer; A Gate at the Stairs is only her third novel. It follows a college student, Tassie Keltjin, as she is hired as a childcare provider, seemingly on a whim, by a restaurant owner who wants to adopt a baby. Set in a fictional Midwest town that is certainly a stand-in for Madison, Wisconsin (where Moore is a college professor), we get a collision of small-town America (Tassie grew up on a farm) and a kind of boho college-town ethos. As Tassie tells us early on about her culture shock: "Twice a week a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James's masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie."

Tassie gets deeply involved with her new employer, Sarah Brink, even to the point of going on meet-and-greets with prospective birth mothers. After a trip to Green Bay a baby of mixed race is adopted, and Tassie, who previously had no special interest in children, bonds with the child. Of course something will go wrong.

The language of this book is heavenly. Almost every paragraph has a sentence to die over. Her similes are inspired, whether about a roadkill squirrel: "It's soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialogue balloon" or snow: "the isolated patches of gray snow were like dryer lint." Then there is the amazing description of her boyfriend's member: "His penis was as small and satiny as a trumpet mushroom in Easter basket grass." As a writer of a lot of erotica, I've had to describe lots of penises, but that one takes the cake.

As wonderful as the writing is, I felt a sense of let-down while being carried along by the plot. Tassie is a wonderful narrator--drolly funny, with a kind of passive defeatism. She likes to use quasi as a prefix, and plays the bass. She and her roommate spend an evening writing songs, titling one "Summer Evening Lunch Meat," which she explains, "combining the most beautiful phrase in English with the ugliest, and therefore summing up our thoughts on love."

The title means many things, but I associate it most with one of those baby-gates installed by parents to keep their children from falling, because, as funny as it can be, this book has an overarching sense of melancholy. It takes place immediately after 9/11, and running throughout is reminders of the fragility of life. Tassie worries about her brother, who joins the military, and there's a subplot involving a character who may or not be an Islamic terrorist. Then there's Sarah's shocking reveal, which is ladled out bit by bit and and seems like something out of daytime drama.

Moore also makes great hay with the insufferability of a certain kind of educated liberal. There's Tassie's course load for her fall semester: Brit Lit from 1830 to 1930, Intro to Sufism, Intro to Wine Tasting (even though she's underage), a music appreciation course titled Soundtracks to War Movies, and a geology course called Dating Rocks. Sarah forms a parents' group of biracial children, and Moore transcribes the pretentious conversation, including one participant who repeatedly says, "Don't get me started on Islam."

As wonderful as this book is written I was let down by the story. I hope Moore revisits Tassie again, because she's a terrific voice.