To be honest, I’d never heard of Lorrie Moore until NPR mentioned a few months ago that she had a new novel, 15 years in the making. And then my boss was so excited about finally getting a copy from the library (the hold list is still about 50 copies deep), that when she finished it, she handed it over to me immediately, despite it being overdue. It was worth the late fees.
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more To be honest, I’d never heard of Lorrie Moore until NPR mentioned a few months ago that she had a new novel, 15 years in the making. And then my boss was so excited about finally getting a copy from the library (the hold list is still about 50 copies deep), that when she finished it, she handed it over to me immediately, despite it being overdue. It was worth the late fees.
Like peeling an onion, but in reverse, A Gate at the Stairs reveals itself through Tassie, a 20-year-old college student, in the year following 9/11. But it isn’t a 9/11 book, though current events loom in the background, because like a lot college students, Tassie’s world is only as big as what immediately surrounds her. After taking a job as a nanny, and perhaps becoming a part of the painstakingly constructed family of Sarah, Edward, and their newly adopted, mixed race daughter Emmie, Tassie’s sheltered, midwestern farm girl life opens up bit by bit: she begins dating a mysterious classmate; she overhears (yet fails to understand) her employees weekly “race” meetings, organized to address the turmoil of what it is like to be a mixed race family.
Eventually, her boyfriend leaves her, and Sarah, a woman of great charm, foreign and unknowable to Tassie, reveals a secret past, Tassie’s life is irrevocably changed. And that’s only half of the novel. The second half of the novel unfolds quickly, pulling the reader through Tassie’s altered landscape, a bit like the midnight scooter ride Tassie takes through the rain following an indulgent farewell dinner.
Moore’s use of language is exquisite to say the least, both serious and funny, irreverent, melancholy, incisive and vast: it is hard not to read her greedily, and then flip back the pages for a second taste. A book of short stories held together by one narrator? Not quite. But Moore’s attention to detail, her ability to pull together all the disparate elements of Tassie’s life, keeps this dense and complicated novel from unraveling.
As a contemporary of the narrator, I found her both naive and likeable. An outsider in a family of outsiders, she stands alone in her universe, almost like an orphan, depending on herself for her news of the world and human nature. While it becomes obvious in places that she is retelling these events with the wisdom of a few years (how many? it can’t be more than eight), she makes nothing of her own foresight, merely laying down the events as they happen.
This novel has more than its share of unsolvable riddles, open for interpretation and wonder, a novel that stays with you, hard to put down and even more difficult to put away. –SCR
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