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Tassie wants a job to earn some extra money during college (that’s university to UK readers). She applies for childcare jobs knowing that she’s good with kids but with little real enthusiasm for this kind of job. Eventually she’s hired by Sarah and Edward Brink, who are planning to adopt a baby and becomes the nanny for Emma Mary, a mixed race two year old. Sarah owns a high end restaurant and is out most of the time and Edward is so uncommitted to his new baby it’s crazy. Tassie spends most of her time with the Brinks, as her roommate has moved in with a boyfriend and her parents live back on their strange, high end produce farm, but she visits home and talks about her roommate often.Phew, glad that’s over. Does anyone else hate writing plot summaries when the novel’s contents are kind of abstract? It’s hard work. Lorrie Moore’s new novel ‘A Gate at the Stairs’ really has too much going on to be summarised, without missing out chunks of interestingness and I’m actually finding it hard to write about at all.
To me Lorrie Moore seems like an old school modernist. She’s obsessed with consciously using reoccurring symbolism (hurray) but the symbols are never explained by context during the novel, for example the central image of the title, the gate at the stairs, is used in a variety of ways. Even though it turns up several times throughout the novel it’s not a consistent running metaphor and could have many meanings. Some of those meaning are easy to guess, but some remain oblique. The same is true of other repeated symbols that Moore includes, like birds which range from flocks of dead songbirds to a bird costume Tassie wears on her dad’s farm. I love that Moore doesn’t simplify her novel’s intentions for readers. I love that she resists the urge to handhold and explain what everything means, so that her novel almost requires a second reading.
Sometimes the novel wanders off on a random track for no real plot reason (again hurray). There’s a short scene where Tassie goes to her boyfriend’s house and finds everything has gone, he will be leaving soon and people may come and say he was part of a terrorist cell. They have a final conversation where nothing makes sense, their responses to each other’s sentences don’t make up a conversation and it doesn’t really relate to anything else in the novel:
‘ “Why London?”
“The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining – a stage Americans bypassed altogether, having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.”
“That is such a bullshit answer.”
“I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone asks you, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them I’m not.”
There was no room in this conversation for “What about us?” The conversational space had suddenly filled with other creatures. Perhaps we had reached that last stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy. '
Somehow this odd way of parting, where Tassie fails to ask him any sensible questions makes sense in the context of the increasingly nonsensical world Tassie finds herself in. Whenever she tries to have a conversation with other adults she finds herself unable to work out how they want her to respond. At first it seems as if this is Tassie’s lack of confidence showing itself, perhaps she imagines their odd reactions to what she says, but soon it’s clear that the adults she meets speak in nonsense phrases, without ever listening, or genuinely conversing:
‘ “There are Austrains saying that shimpanzees are people.”
“And don’t get me started with the primate research. There is such an eagerness to lump black people with apes. Beasts of any kind.”
“That’s done even to the Jews.”
“Well, Austrians…”
“What do you mean, ‘even’?”
“I mean nothing. I meant even chickens. I’ve heard the PETA people compare what goes on with chickens to what went on with the Jews.”
“Well, how else are you going to make them sit still in their nests and do your taxes if you don’t cut their legs off?”
“Your sense of humour is too dark.”
“Don’t say ‘dark’. It’s racist.” '
Sarah Brink hires her because she sees something real in Tassie, perhaps something she recognises from her younger self, but she quickly finds of the open, genuine way Tassie acts an inconvenience. She asks Tassie to visit the birth mother with her and Edward, but when Tassie accepts she quickly realises that was not the expected answer. In the supposed real world of mixed race adoption, business ownership and marriage everything seems fake. The only authentic people Tassie meets are her own age like her roommate Murphy, or other domestic workers like Noelle.
For all that I really liked ‘A Gate at the Stairs’ I don’t agree with the reviews I’ve seen that say Moore has cracked writing in novel length (or the ones that seems to think a lack of novels shows she is lacking as a writer). Some passages in the novel drag because the writing is not a tight as it could be. It could have been shorter without losing any of its significance and in some ways it might have been more vital if some of Tassie’s descriptive introspection had been removed. The writing really shines during the personal interactions between characters, or Tassie’s thoughts about people, but it feels like Moore is trying to go past detailed social observation to a way of explaining the world that uses sustained descriptive passages and less dialogue. This technique doesn’t always feel as incisive as the way she uses dialogue to skewer people’s behaviour. ‘A Gate at the Stairs’ wouldn’t necessarily work better as a novella, but a shorter novel might have been better.
I’d like to have the time to break Moore’s writing down, line by line and study how she writes and what she means, comparing major themes across her works. I don’t really have time for that in a first time reading, so I’m thinking of making the writings of Lorrie Moore a little personal project this year as I have her collected short stories and I could reread ‘Who Will Run the Frog Hospital’, as well as some criticism if I can find any that’s cheap. Meanwhile will ‘A Gate at the Stairs’ be on the Orange shortlist? I think it should be there, but my shortlist slots are filling up so fast and I’ve only read five books from the list. Maybe I’m not being critical enough, grrr must be tougher like the real judges.
Other Reviews
Necromancy Never Pays
The Betty and Boo Chronicles
Tales from the Reading Room
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