Despite this novel’s serious flaws, it is a gratifying experience. You don’t so much read Lorrie Moore’s books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you.
If you’ve seen The Door in the Floor (directed by Tod Williams, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, released in 2004), you know it’s about an innocent young man whose summer job entangles him with a married couple reeling from the loss of their teenage sons. The considerable pleasure of watching the movie comes from seeing the characters, willingly or otherwise, reveal their gloriously dark, twisted selves to us and to one another.
Working with strikingly similar raw materials, Lorrie Moore takes a very different—and problematical—approach to storytelling in A Gate at the Stairs, her third novel and her first book in eleven years. Instead of providing the information a reader needs to understand a fraught situation, Moore withholds key facts, offers red herrings and bridges to nowhere, before hitting us with a credulity-straining, shocking revelation three-quarters of the way through.
Moore’s use of a first-person narrator only makes things worse, in that readers are left to wonder not only why the author has treated us ill, but also why the person we most want to sympathize with—likeable young Tassie Keltjin—held out on us for so long. At first blush, twenty-year-old Tassie seems the type of plucky, brilliantly self-aware heroine familiar to fans of Moore’s previous novels and short stories. She’s a girl from the Midwest who has a way with one-liners, and who reliably finds someone to swap them with, be it friend or lover. Set in a fictional town reminiscent of Madison, Wisconsin—where Moore lives and teaches—Tassie’s story begins in the fall of 2001. “You sick slut!” she playfully tells a friend phoning from a boyfriend’s apartment on the morning of September 11. “People were killed. All you think about is your own pleasure.”
A college student, Tassie seeks part-time work as a nanny. Pointedly reminding the reader that she is recalling these events from the future, she reflects on the significance of a broken gate latch at her prospective employers’ home. She enters their house “mutely at first and then, as always, apologetically, as if I were late, though I wasn’t.” Great characters are full of contradictions but… is this the same fiercely flippant person from two pages back? Sarah Brink, the lady of the house, will later tell Tassie, “I hired you because you seemed angelic to me,” a statement that jars with what we’ve come to know about both women. Neither character quite gels.
Sarah hires Tassie in advance of adopting a child, and the first third of the book consists of a blow-by-blow account of the adoption process. After bringing home a toddler whose mother is white and whose father is black, Sarah and her husband confront racial prejudice in a town they thought was progressive. When Sarah organizes Wednesday evening confabs for parents of mixed-race children, Tassie provides childcare in the attic, separated from the adults by multiple baby gates and flights of stairs. How can Tassie possibly hear the adult conversations? Readers may wonder why would she want to, after reading some of the dialogue that comes between our first inkling of an “unfortunate backstory” (Sarah’s term) and when the grim, gory truth is finally told. Sarah, we learn, has been keeping a terrible secret, the revelation of which coincides with her abrupt departure from the novel. Tragedy, indeed.
Time passes; as Tassie says, “the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath.” Intriguing plot possibilities involving the birth parents’ desire to reclaim their child die on the vine while Moore nervously eyes Big Issues like climate change and terrorism. Tassie’s boyfriend unexpectedly turns out to be a jihadist bound for London, and so Tassie limps home to rural Dellacrosse, where her family still lives. There we are reintroduced to her brother and warned of the potentially tragic consequences of archiving e-mail to read “later.” The denouement includes a coffin scene that had me wondering what Moore was smoking.
Given this novel’s serious flaws, the question arises: Why is reading it such a gratifying experience? The answer lies in the author’s prodigious talent. The best film directors and writers create a universe with each new work, and Lorrie Moore is one of the best. You don’t so much read her books as inhabit them—after which they inhabit you. The problems with plot and character development in A Gate at the Stairs are like pesky mosquitoes: best slapped before they get in the way of a reader’s enjoyment. Whatever its flaws, Moore’s signature wit and insight are in full force here, awaiting your discovery.
