[This is a review by Christie C, who will contribute more articles in the future.]
Yesterday evening I attended writer Lorrie Moore’s book reading at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., a stop on her whirlwind tour to promote her new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs.” The room was full of mostly middle-aged women, and I quickly formulated my own personal (and undoubtedly flawed) stereotype of the Lorrie Moore fan: wry, sly, gaunt, clad in muted dark colors, steely hair, steely reserve; observant to an almost unnerving degree; a woman who was or at least looked like a librarian or university professor; with a wicked sense of humor and her share of romantic disappointments, perhaps a divorce or two (most of the women were sans date… including me). I felt an eerie mixture of empathy and camaraderie with some of these women who seemed in a state of romantic and jolly decay, like pre-flood New Orleans. I saw myself in 20 years.
A woman sitting next to me, with chin-length dark hair and a striking aquiline nose, broke the mold just a bit; seated next to a man I assumed was her husband, she was sweetly enthusiastic, following along in her personal copy of the new book as Moore spoke the words aloud, girlishly unabashed in her admiration. In the jittery minutes before Moore made her appearance at the dais up front, the woman next to me flipped a couple of pages and gestured at a dense block of text, and I listened as she gave her husband what I thought was a pretty good 30-second review: “… Like this part here. It’s good; it’s compelling and well-written and the end is funny, but… it could have been cut out. It doesn’t really add to the plot. There were a lot of parts like that.”
The plot of “A Gate at the Stairs” is fairly simple: Tassie Keltjin is a precociously perceptive 20-year-old college student, raised on a farm in Wisconsin, now going to a university in a fictional city called Troy that is meant to be a sort of doppelganger for the real-life (and never mentioned) city of Madison. In need of a job, Tassie answers ads from people seeking a “childcare provider.” (“Childcare, like healthcare, had become one word. I would be a dispenser of it.”) She gets hired by Sarah Brink, the scrappy and screwball-likeable owner of a fancy restaurant who is married to the caddish Edward; unable to conceive, Sarah and Edward have decided to adopt. Tassie is invited to tag along on meetings with birth mothers, and always in tow are the adoption-agency representatives who place a premium on (because prospective adoptive parents place a premium on) the babies’ “whiteness”–to an extent that high-minded liberal Sarah self-righteously adopts a bi-racial toddler, Mary, almost as if to spite them. The story follows Tassie (the first-person protagonist), Sarah, and Edward after Mary is brought into the family, and the 300-plus pages are buoyed by Tassie’s often humorous musings on motherhood, class, race, city versus country, university life, and love in its myriad forms. Oh, and also, American patriotic fervor and existential apprehension post-9/11 is in there. And some plot contortions at the end.
I admit that when I–a longtime and ardent fan of Moore’s short-fiction collections and even of her experimental novel “Anagrams” that received a withering review from the highly influential critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times–first read the plot synopsis in early reviews and interviews with Moore in magazines from Harper’s to Elle… I wasn’t too excited. The themes seemed perfunctory to me, a dutiful mishmash, and I wondered if Moore had lately felt the need to do penance for not addressing the social issues of the day in much of her previous work (an exception being the acclaimed story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a semi-autobiographical account of her son’s cancer scare as an infant; today Moore’s son’s health has remarkably improved and he is even competing in soccer at the national level). The title, I learned from reviews, did not refer to some mental Mobius strip, some esoteric or philosophical notion but to something prosaic: the baby gates placed atop stairways for safety (although, knowing Moore, the title probably refers to both). And while I always applaud an artist for trying something new–well, I really really liked Moore’s previous work and was hoping for more of the same.
I’d grown accustomed to the Moore-like protagonists: urbane, world-weary yet unsinkable in a non-corny way, with their witty observations and revelatory wordplay. (From “How to Be an Other Woman,” a short story in the outstanding collection “Self-Help”: “Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.”) A 20-year-old farm girl, wide-eyed in the big city, babysitting for a couple of middle-aged liberal yuppies? I dreaded a novel narrated by an “Aw, shucks” kind of ingenue who starts off innocent and ends up predictably cynical, world-weary, wry, with a wicked sense of humor and a romantic disappointment or two… and attending a Lorrie Moore reading.
To my surprise, Tassie turns out to be a riveting guide into and through the story, with a depth and scope beyond her years. (Moore explained at last night’s reading that the story is actually narrated by a 28-year-old or so Tassie, looking back a bit). What’s striking to me is that Tassie is so unexpectedly urbane for a 20-year-old farm girl. The upside of this is that the book, in typical Moore style, is engrossing and sprinkled with insights both profound and truly humorous. The downside, for me at least, is that I never fully bought into the Tassie character, could never quite reconcile her urbanity and nonstop, piercing observations–with the fact that she is supposed to be a 20-year-old farm girl (with all due respect to 20-year-old farm girls). While it’s true that Tassie, unlike many of Moore’s female protagonists, has a purity and lack of duplicitousness that’s refreshing–I couldn’t shake the feeling that Moore was peppering the book with many of her own brilliant insights and musings, using Tassie as a sort of arbitrary conduit.
And yet–that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because I agree with the woman seated next to me at the reading: vast swaths of text could probably have been expunged without altering the “story,” but you read those swaths anyway, and you enjoy them, because Moore wrote them, and she is just a damn good writer. One of the reviews that I read pointed out that Moore has a gift for elevating the everyday through language. Occasionally Moore’s wonderful imagination–well-suited for describing a young person’s awe at the world around her–can get a bit carried away: “Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh.” Much of the book is filled with similar dense, imagistic, footnote-worthy observations of Tassie’s. It does create a vivid set for the reader, and is in fact probably how a bookish 20-year-old like Tassie would see and describe her world.
At the reading, Moore talked of Tassie’s role as insider among several worlds (country, city, university… yuppie couple with shady past and their adopted baby), and of how Tassie is an optimally positioned social observer, “like Jane Eyre, whom I believe was also 20.” Looking back on the novel in the light of this remark, I thought that a book can be a perfectly worthy read even if the only takeaway is a steady stream of spot-on social observation.
But I think that what the woman seated next to me was lamenting, in a way, was the lack of chiseled, diamond-sharp perfection that often characterizes Moore’s short fiction–the sense that every word in a story counts, every word is fighting to be there; every sentence sings with resonance. For me–so used to breathlessly analyzing Moore’s every keystroke–reading a 300-plus-page novel by that same author felt overwhelming, and even as I tried to forgive seemingly hasty and (to me) unnecessary constructions such as “she smiled happily,” I came away with the conclusion that Moore’s gifts are best displayed in her shorter work.
Which brings me to another nagging sense I had when reading the novel–that the big picture wasn’t that well-thought-out, or even that important. I found myself wondering, What is the point of all of this, other than to showcase Moore’s powers of description and sporadic, isolated insights and the “punning” that many have pointed out are a staple in her books? Does the book seek to make some statement about adoption, parenting, class- and race-based hypocrisies in America? What was her burning impulse when writing this–what drove her on, during the 11 years it took her since her last book, writing in stolen moments when not teaching at the University of Wisconsin or raising her son as a single working parent?
At last night’s reading, someone asked some similar “What’s the big picture?” kind of question, about what Moore had set out to do, in the very beginning when she got the idea for this novel. And her answer surprised me: She talked of geography, about how she’d “always wanted to do a Midwestern novel, a novel set entirely there,” being a New York-born transplant to Madison 25 years ago. I thought, Huh? There are all these themes–the adoption, the 9/11 stuff–and at the end of the day all she’d wanted to do was “write a Midwestern novel”?
But what might seem like a lack of ambition makes sense if you–like me–most love Moore for the nuggets, the little gems found in her stories and novels, including “A Gate at the Stairs.” I often come away from reading one of Moore’s books with the feeling that she thinks about and perceives the world on some higher plane, that her brain is constantly twisting words and scrambling letters (again, nearly all of Moore’s characters seem to engage in witty wordplay at some point or other, even the men, even the children, even the characters who otherwise aren’t so smart) to reveal the universe’s secret codes. Ultimately, I think, that is why you read a Lorrie Moore book–not for textbook-perfect plot structure, or hypothesis-data-conclusion following through of themes, or realistic dialogue (even peripheral characters tend to sound far wittier than folks do in real life).
You can think of these nuggets like the fortune-cookie messages that Tassie collects and sticks in her books as bookmarks. (“All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their pages.”)
“At the cash register small boxes of broken fortune cookies were sold at discount. ‘Only cookie broken,’ promised the sign, ‘not fortune.’ I vowed to buy a box one day to see what guidance–obscure or mystical or mercenary, but Confucian!–might be had in bulk. Meanwhile, I collected them singly, one per every cookie that came at the end atop my check, briskly, efficiently, before I’d even finished eating.”
The Sum Up: Not the Lorrie Moore book I’d recommend–instead, read Moore’s renowned story collection, “Birds of America” (or her collections “Self-Help” or “Like Life”); her critically acclaimed novel “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?”; for something less traditional in storytelling style, try her novel “Anagrams.”