Product Description

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 forever changed.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-01
• Released on: 2009-09-01
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375409288
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009: Lorrie Moore's people are jokesters, wisenheimers. They hold the world, and the language used to describe it, a little off to the side, where they can turn it around and, if not figure it out, at least find something funny to say about it, which, often, is not quite enough. It's been 11 years since her last book, 15 since her last novel, but A Gate at the Stairs is vintage Moore: brittly witty and lurkingly dark, the portrait of a Midwest college town through the eyes of Tassie Keltjin, a student from the country whose mind has been lit up by learning but who spends nearly all this story out of class, as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a toddler. Tassie's a bit of a toddler herself (and an ideal narrator because of it), testing the world as if through her teeth, and she finds the world stranger and more deeply wounded the more she learns of it. Her investigations make A Gate at the Stairs sad, hilarious, and thrillingly necessary. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles The first paragraph of Lorrie Moore's new novel imagines songbirds caught by a killing frost, heaps of them piling up in a cornfield and others dropping from the sky. That ghoulish image and an allusion to Sept. 11 just a few paragraphs later cast a funereal shadow over this coming-of-age story, but Moore is such a bright, witty writer that it's easy to ignore those warnings. Then, like real life, she blindsides you with some red-raw tragedy. "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. Moore returns to this longer form with an unhurried tale about a year in the life of a quirky young woman. 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." It begins in the fall of 2001, when Tassie Keltjin is a smart but inexperienced student from a farming community known as the "Extraterrestrial Capital of the World." She's dazzled by the sophistication of her Midwestern college town (Chinese food!) and riveted by academic life (Sylvia Plath!). In need of spending money, she gets a job as a nanny for a high-strung woman named Sarah Brink, who runs a French restaurant that happens to serve organic potatoes from her father's boutique farm. Sarah is brash and eccentric in a way Tassie has never known. Her face "was one of bravado laced with doom, like fat in meat." She darts down the up escalator just for fun and bakes her library books to kill the germs. "I was going to have to become a different person biologically just to associate with her," Tassie realizes. Something about the nanny job seems odd from the start -- Sarah doesn't have any children, for instance -- but this is largely a story about a young woman's introduction to the bizarre behavior that underlies apparently normal people's lives. "It seemed one could just say Are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified," Tassie thinks. "It was the beginning of a long stretch of thinking I was hearing things." Much of the novel is taken up with Tassie's bemused observations on parents, her own and others', old and new, white and black. Hovering slightly outside the world, lonely but yearning, she can be a piercingly perceptive critic even when her sympathies are fully engaged. Sarah wants Tassie to be with her in the final stages of her efforts to adopt a baby, and so she accompanies Sarah to troubling, awkward interviews with potential birth mothers. It's an education more sobering than anything Tassie is studying in college. "After a childhood of hungering to be an adult," she thinks, "my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep." Eventually, Sarah and her errant husband bring home a biracial toddler, a happy event that provides material for some of the novel's most incisive and comic commentary about race in America. Shocked by a slur shouted by some passing teens, Sarah begins meetings at her house for other "transracial, biracial, multiracial families." What transpires is a hilarious parody of "a spiritually gated community of liberal chat." Every Wednesday night "the opinions downstairs were put forth with such emphasis and confidence, it all sounded like an orchestra made up entirely of percussion." Is there a better description of the toneless exchange of platitudes about race in this country? Tassie listens with a mixture of alarm and sarcasm as Sarah grows more grandiose about raising her child. "We are pioneers," she tells Tassie with forced seriousness. "We are doing something important, unprecedented and unbearably hard." No more singing "I Been Working on the Railroad" with the baby; Sarah is concerned about "the grammar and the use of slave labor." I should warn you that Moore is a lot more interested in her narrator than her plot. There is a fair amount of precocious riffing in this novel, a syncopation of sweet and mordant beats. Things do happen -- even startling, gripping things -- but any reader who needs that to stay engaged will have drifted away 200 pages earlier during one of Tassie's soliloquies. Much of her fascination with words and wordplay is amusing, but some of it seems too clever by half, along with her super-duper writing-seminar descriptions of the weather that are polished to distracting brilliance. The events of 9/11 enter the novel with mixed success, too. Tassie's entanglement with an Islamofascist, for instance, seems corny and forced in a story that treats all of her other relationships with depth and sensitivity. But 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 novel's climax takes us right into the disorienting logic of grief for a scene that's both horrifying and tender, a grotesque violation of taboos that's entirely forgivable and heartbreaking. That paradox is reflected in the novel's title. Nominally, it refers to the gate -- "still broken" -- in front of the stairs at Sarah's house. But as the story progresses, Moore turns the phrase over and over, drawing it out as a metaphor for the stairway to heaven, blocked for most of us by a gate that may or may not open. The image shows up again in the "waltzy ballads" that Tassie writes for her bass guitar. Indeed, one of the many surprising aspects of this novel is its concern for spiritual issues, despite its sheen of slacker irreverence. Tassie tosses the Bible aside as "the official Judeo-Christian comedy," but her reflections are laced with cleverly turned Scriptural allusions. At times, these witty, beautiful sentences made me imagine Marilynne Robinson doing stand-up. "Death and dessert," Tassie thinks when she sees two bowls, one with cream, the other with an artificial sweetener "invented accidentally by chemists during a reformulation of insecticide." They're emblems of the way Tassie eventually regards the world. "Sweetness and doom, lay side by side," she thinks. "I was coming to see that this was not uncommon." It's not uncommon at all in this strange and moving novel.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Uncertain brilliance
Like other reviewers I come to this novel as an admirer of Lorrie Moore's piquant short stories, which render with deftness and sympathy the oddness, pleasure, and pain of being human. All of Moore's strengths as a writer -- her ability to find just the right off-the-wall metaphor, her comic sidewise advance on the most painful experiences, her sardonic wit -- are on display here. But the space afforded her by the longer form appears to have reduced her vigilance in maintaining the economy and precision of her shorter fiction. Too much of a good thing is sometimes just too much.

There were long (they seemed long anyway) stretches in the novel where I wanted to say "OK, I get the point! These people are callow and self-absorbed." Or where I wished she had stopped after the first, or even the second, mind-bending metaphor for the same observation.

And then there is the plot, which hangs together only tenuously. Tassie at school and Tassie at home seem largely unconnected, and there are elements of suspense introduced that trail off into nothingness. Perhaps this could be explained as imitative of life, but it often seems to be gratuitous.

Tassie's family is eccentric, a pleasure we have come to expect from Moore, but too often these people come off as self-parodies. The early character development of Tassie's brother Robert is a caricature that doesn't really pave the way for the depth of grief that engulfs the end of the novel.

Tassie is an interesting character and an entertaining narrator, but her insouciance and diffidence distance us from her throughout, and we never really fully penetrate her self-protective shield. In the end I agree with the reviewer who said that Moore would be better served by leaving the undergraduate world behind and finding adult company.

Too sad when it's sad, too funny when it's funny.
When Tassie's story starts, it is almost too convincing as a portrait of an aimless college girl. I say this because the aimless college years are probably only interesting in retrospect, and to the person who lived through them. So Tassie's stupid classes, unfocused yearnings and blanket rejection of all that is "old" are convincing, but not all that entertaining. This is the case throughout the entire book.

Where her life intersects with the household in which she will work as a nanny, the story moves and engages the reader. The process of private adoption, the sadness of birth mothers, the attachment the "help" develops for the child who is not hers, and the oblique observation of the marriage of your employer; so perfectly done. As perfectly done is the development of Tassie's romance with her mysterious Brazilian, the quiet way she discovers the joys of lovemaking, how she seeks out the passions of her own life on her employer's time, unaware that this is absolutely not right.

But things need to happen in a story, and as hilarious as Tassie and Sarah's conversations are, as oily and disgusting as Edward and his "hair cape" are, as painful as Tassie's plummet into unrequited love with Reynaldo is, when things happen here, they happen. Boom, boom, boom, Tassie is confronted with three great griefs all in a row. Where do you turn when everything in life disappoints you? Home, I guess.

There are things "wrong" with this book. Tassie's voice, though accurate, is at times allowed to veer into hectic, antic, as she talks too much and Moore lets her do that. She tosses off cynical natterings to the point where as i reader I almost didn't like her, because none of her cynicism was based on experience. Also, Moore needs to pick a simile. Even if they're all good, one metaphor per sentence is enough, and there are sentences, paragraphs and pages that are overstuffed and tiring due to metaphorical overload. And the insufferable Wednesday night meetings of racially mixed families; the first one was kind of funny, and enough, because it's painful to hear people go on like that. Were these giving voice or merely making a mockery? I couldn't tell and after the second meeting started, I skimmed. Much more effective is the accurate portrait of what it is like to be out and about with a child of another race, knowing that eyes are on you and conclusions are being reached about who and what you are in the first instant of a stranger's visual perception.

The pleasures of reading Lorrie Moore, her humor, her unmatched gift for metaphor and her painstaking rendition of human emotions, far outweigh any flaws in the book. The scene when Tassie finally eats at Sarah's restaurant is killingly funny and satisfying. But be warned that this is a very sad story, one that raises far more questions about its characters than it ever answers.

The Groves of Academe, redux
A version of the first chapter of Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" recently appeared as a short story in "The New Yorker," and on the strength of that, I was excited to read the whole novel. The protagonist, Tassie Keltjin, a young woman from a small town who is a freshman at a Midwestern university, is very appealing in her awkwardness, her wry comments on life, and her growing self-awareness. Moore has a sharp eye for the pretensions of a college town, such as the fraught "support group" conversations that ensue when Tassie's employer, Sarah Brink (a perfect surname you'll discover), adopts a bi-racial child. The parts of the novel that center on this adoption process and on Tassie's relationship with the child are the strongest in the novel. I also loved the account of Tassie's rather aimless, unsupported academic life (and the goofy courses she takes).

There are actually two narratives in "A Gate at the Stairs:" the first centers on Tassie's college life and the second on her home life. These two worlds do not intersect and the home narrative is much less successful. For reasons I couldn't fathom, Moore gives Tassie an unhappy Jewish mother who behaves oddly (she orders things online and never opens the boxes, for instance), although the reasons for her unhappiness are never divulged. I sensed that Moore was less comfortable with this material; the latke (potato pancake) frying scene was completely weird and wrong, for instance. (You don't grate potatoes the day before you make latkes, unless you enjoy fermentation and strange colors, and you certainly don't slap them together like a hamburger patty, as Tassie does.) The dad, an alternative-type farmer who grows heirloom potatoes for the kind of precious "gourmet" restaurant run by Sarah, is also unhappy, as is her brother, who escapes by joining the army. The Keltjins' hometown, with which they don't have much to do, is small in size and narrow-minded in outlook. None of this really hangs together the way the parts of the novel set in the college town do. It's stock parochial small town stuff, and it isn't improved at the end by the pastoral rhapsodies that Tassie indulges in after her life has taken a few strange turns, including a connection (rather unconvincing, I thought) to the post-9/11 world.

Moore is a good writer, and "A Gate by the Stairs" is definitely worth a read, particularly for its satirical send-up of the kind of college town where naive small town freshmen stumble into courses like "Soundtracks to War Movies" and where Tassie meets her PE requirement AND gets a humanities credit for "The Perverse Body/The Neutral Pelvis." She finds out a lot about that, although not in class.