A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

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.

From the Publisher

In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America (“[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability” —James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.

Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.

As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.

The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is foreverchanged.

This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.

The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Lethem

…more expansive than either of her two previous novels…also a novel that brandishes some "big" material: racism, war, etc.—albeit in Moore's resolutely insouciant key…Great writers usually present us with mysteries, but the mystery Lorrie Moore presents consists of appearing genial, joshing and earnest at once—unmysterious, in other words, yet still great. She's a discomfiting, sometimes even rageful writer, lurking in the disguise of an endearing one. On finishing A Gate at the Stairs I turned to the reader nearest to me and made her swear to read it immediately

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

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…The story's apparent modesty and ambling pace are deceptive, a cover for profound reflections on marriage and parenthood, racism and terrorism, and especially the baffling, hilarious, brutal initiation to adult life—what all of us learn to endure "in the dry terror of cluelessness"…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 New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

…Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief…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.

Publishers Weekly

Moore (Anagrams) knits together the shadow of 9/11 and a young girl's bumpy coming-of-age in this luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel—the author's first in 15 years. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in “the Athens of the Midwest,” is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent “adventures in prospective motherhood” involve a pregnant girl “with scarcely a tooth in her head” and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend—both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less naïve Tassie. In a parallel tale, Tassie lands a lover, enigmatic Reynaldo, who tries to keep certain parts of his life a secret from Tassie. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy, while generous flashes of wit—Tessie the sexual innocent using her roommate's vibrator to stir her chocolate milk—endow this stellar novel with great heart. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Just months after 9/11, college student Tassie Keltjin, the brilliant daughter of a Midwestern farmer, becomes a part-time nanny for an older white couple who have adopted an African American baby. Enjoying her delightful young charge and reveling in her love affair with her Brazilian boyfriend, Tassie has a growing suspicion that her employers are somehow off. When their identities, as well as her boyfriend's, are blown, Tassie heads home, only to be hit with another, more devastating shock. VERDICT Moore uses the same kind of poetic precision of language found in her dazzling short story collections (e.g., Birds of America) to draw the reader into her long-awaited third novel (after Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?). The challenge for readers is to reconcile the beautiful sharpness of her language with two wildly improbable plot threads. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]—Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Kirkus Reviews

In How Fiction Works, the tutorial by the New Yorker critic and Harvard professor, James Wood writes, "Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on."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. And they are more than enough, for the 20-year-old college student makes for good company. Perceptive, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, she lulls the reader into not taking the matter-of-fact events of Tassie's life too seriously, until that life darkens through a series of events that even the best noticers might not have predicted. Because her ostensible roommate now lives with a boyfriend, we get to know Tassie very well-as a fully fleshed character rather than a type-and spend a lot of time inside her head. She splits her year between the university community more liberal than the rest of the Midwest and the rural Wisconsin town where her father is considered more of a "hobbyist" farmer than a real one. "What kind of farmer's daughter was I?" she asks. A virgin, but more from lack of opportunity than moral compunction (she compares her dating experiences to an invisible electric fence for dogs), and a bass player, both electric and stand-up. Singing along to her instrument, she describes "trying to find themidway place between melody and rhythm-was this searching not the very journey of life?"Explains Moore of her protagonist, "Once I had the character and voice of Tassie I felt I was on my way. She would be the observer of several worlds that were both familiar and not familiar to her . . . Initially I began in the third person and it was much more of a ghost story and there were a lot of sisters and, well, it was a false start."It's hard to imagine this novel working in the third person, because we need to see Tassie's life through her eyes. As she learns some crucial lessons outside the classroom, the reader learns as well to be a better noticer. Tassie's instincts are sound, but her comic innocence takes a tragic turn, as she falls into her first serious romance, finds a job as nanny for an adopted, biracial baby and suffers some aftershocks from 9/11 a long way from Manhattan. The enrichment of such complications makes this one of the year's best novels, yet it is Tassie's eye that makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. First printing of 100,000. Author tour to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Madison, Wis., Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

1. In addition to her sense of humor and intelligence, what are Tassie's strengths as a narrator? How does what she describes as “an unseemly collection of jostling former selves” (p. 63) affect the narrative and contribute to the appeal of her tale?

2. In the farming community where Tassie grew up, her father “seemed a vaguely contemptuous character. . . . His idiosyncrasies appeared to others to go beyond issues of social authenticity and got into questions of God and man and existence” (p. 19). Does the family, either intentionally or inadvertently, perpetuate their standing as outsiders? How does Moore use what ordinarily might be seen as clichés and stereotypes to create believable and sympathetic portraits of both the locals and the Keltjin family?

3. How does the initial meeting between Tassie and Sarah (pp. 10-24) create a real, if hesitant, connection between them? What aspects of their personalities come out in their conversation? To what extent are their impressions of each other influenced by their personal needs, both practical and psychological?

4. Are Sarah's ill-chosen comments at the meetings with Amber (p. 32) and Bonnie (pp. 89-90, p. 93) the result of the natural awkwardness between a birth mother and a potential adoptive mother or do they reveal deeper insecurities in Sarah? Does the adoption process inevitably involve a certain amount of willful deception, unenforceable promises (p. 87), and a “ceremony of approval . . . [that is] as with all charades. . . . wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin” (p. 95)?

5. What is the significance of Tassie's first impression of Edward-“one could see it was his habit toalmost imperceptibly dominate and insult”-and her realization that “[d]espite everything, [Sarah] was in love with him” (p. 91)? Does Edward's behavior at dinner and the “small conspiracy” he and Tassie establish (pp. 112-114) offer a more sympathetic (or at least more understandable) view of him? Are there other passages in the novel that bring out the contradictions between his outward behavior and his private thoughts?

6. Does A Gate at the Stairs accurately reflect the persistence of racism in America? What do the comments and encounters sprinkled throughout in the novel (pp. 80, 112, 151, 167, 229) show about the various forms racism takes in our society?

7. Do you agree with Sarah's statement, “Racial blindness-now there's a very white idea” (p. 86)? What do the discussions in Sarah's support group (pp. 154-57; 186-90; 194-97) reveal about the different perceptions of reality held by African-Americans and white liberals? What role do class, wealth, and professional status play in opinions expressed by various members of the group? In this context, what is the import of Tassie's description of Mary-Emma's affection for Reynaldo: “the colorblindness of small children is a myth; she noticed difference and sameness, with almost equal interest; there was no 'Dilemma of Difference' as my alliteration-loving professors occasionally put it” (p. 169)?

8. How would you characterize the comments about religion throughout the novel (pp. 41, 108, 129)? What is the significance of the fact that Tassie's mother is Jewish, a woman of “indeterminate ethnicity” in a churchgoing community? Why are Roberta Marshall and Sarah so cavalier about Bonnie's insistence that her child be raised as a Catholic (p. 87)? How do Reynaldo's revelations about his activities and beliefs (pp. 204-8) fit into Tassie's view of God and religion in general? On page 296, Tassie offers a thoughtful explanation of the purpose of religion in people's lives. Are there other lessons about the meaning of religion or faith to be found in the novel?

9. The title of the book comes from a ballad Tassie writes with her roommate (p. 219-20). What does music-playing the bass and singing to Mary-Emma-represent to Tassie? How does it connect her to her own family and to Mary-Emma?

10. Does the novel prepare you for Sarah's dreadful confession (pp. 232-242)? What particular incidents or conversations foreshadow the revelations? How do Sarah's “conventional” beliefs about men and women affect the couple's behavior during and after the tragedy (pp. 240, 244)? Was their decision to move and start anew the best solution under the circumstances? Do the reasons Sarah gives for remaining with Edward make emotional sense? If they had been able to keep their secret hidden, would they have been able to create a happy future with Mary-Emma?

11. Nannies and other household help often grasp things families don't realize about themselves. Is Tassie an objective chronicler of life in the Brink-Thornwood household? What biases does she bring to her observations? How do her perceptions and opinions change over the course of the novel? In what ways does her growing attachment to Mary-Emma and her relationship with Sarah account for these changes? In what ways are they attributable to the developments in her personal life?

12. How do the vignettes of Tassie's visits home and her life in Troy play off one another? What do Tassie's conversations with her family bring out about the ambivalence she (and many college students) experience? Why does Tassie fail to recognize the depth of Robert's pain and confusion? Is Robert's decision to join the army given the attention it deserves by the rest of the family?

13. Does the Midwestern setting of the novel offer a distinctive perspective on September 11, 2001, and the mood of the country? How were the events experienced in other parts of America-for example, in the cities directly affected by the terrorist attacks?

14. Lorrie Moore has been widely praised for her affecting depictions of human vulnerability and her dark humor. How does Moore integrate clever one-liners, puns, and wordplay into the serious themes she is exploring? What role does humor play in exposing the thoughts, feelings, and fears the characters are unwilling or unable to express? Does it heighten the emotional force of the novel or diminish it?

15. “I had also learned that in literature-perhaps as in life-one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself” (p. 263-64]. How does this quotation apply to your reading of A Gate at the Stairs?

Forewords & Introductions

Read an Excerpt