A Gate at the Stairs
By Lorrie Moore
Review by Elizabeth Yepez
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In her much-anticipated novel, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore displays the full range of her dark wit and descriptive capacity. Perhaps best known for her acclaimed collection of short stories, Birds of America, Moore debuts this, her third novel, after 11 years of toil.
Moving alternately from her insular, Midwestern hometown of Dellacrosse to the suburbs of the Wisconsin university she attends is Tassie Keljian, the main character and part-time employee of a local research professor and his eccentric wife, Sarah. Tassie, awkward and self-conscious, shuttles clumsily between the depressed reality of domestic life at home and the attractive worldliness of the classroom and of her roommate, Murph. At work, she is swept into the private strivings of Sarah, who is set on adopting a baby with or without her husband, and the eventual social implications of Mary Emma, the mixed-race toddler adopted by Sarah.
Tassie, absorbed by her employer’s new daughter, and later, obsessed with the ghost of Mary Emma’s birth mother, is increasingly exposed to a mosaic world of isolation and guilt. On the heels of personal tragedy, Tassie observes, “We were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless.”
Moore must recognize her deep capacity for tragedy insomuch as she tempered it throughout the novel with moments of quiet tenderness and humor—a frozen lake with thick and swaying reeds visible below the surface; a Bach cello prelude; The Sufic Hymn of the Dirty Dozen; the upcoming harvest at home.
Nevertheless, in admitting A Gate at the Stairs general tendency toward the melancholy, Moore said in an interview with The New York Times that part of the reason it took so long to finish the novel was that it was often wrenching to pen certain parts of story. “There were certain scenes that felt so heartbreaking to me that I didn’t know how I was going to write them,” she said.
These apparent breaks were not without their traces, however. Moore’s powers of description and ability to pack a punch in brief but significant snapshots of time—powers so clearly on display in the short stories in Birds of America, Self-Help, and Like Life—do not make a fluid transition to the expanded novel format. While rife with character and poignant observation, the “separate narratives”—Mary Emma’s adoption, Sarah and Edward’s marriage, Tassie’s ill-fated relationship (perhaps a too-overt effort at zeitgeist), and the concluding Brink and Teljian family dramas—contribute to a yawning, not to mention strange, overall plotline.
At worst, A Gate at the Stairs is an often overly ambitious novel best digested in short visits, but never to be ingested whole. At best, however, its broad scope is forgivable in light of the beauty it amasses in Sarah and Tassie’s relationship, in the private musings of the narrator, and of Moore’s own restraining hand when it comes to both personal and social tragedy.
