A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The other day, I told someone that I don't cry when I read something sad. That's mostly true--but as with just about everything else, there's an exception. Lorrie Moore has managed to beat my heartlessness twice. First was her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Next was her new, upcoming novel A Gate at the Stairs (thanks, BEA!). Moore is great, better than any author I've come across, at getting to my weakest spots, and doing it so deftly that I don't even notice the piercing until it's too late. It's like the sweetest sucker punch ever.

A Gate at the Stairs follows Tassie Keltjin, a midwestern farm girl trying hard to push back her ordinary roots in favor of something more urbane. This lands her at an unnamed liberal arts college in her home state, a dot of blue surrounded by provincial red politics around 9/11. The book's events start just after the World Trade Center bombing, and I appreciate that Moore made it essentially a footnote as she moved into the bigger themes of love and loss.

But Tassie's main path is less historical. Looking for a basic babysitting job, she ends up on the doorstep of Sarah and Edward, a couple seeking a nanny for the baby they're trying to adopt. Tassie is sucked into this family, which represents the liberal/academic/foodie pretension she seems to want, and its attendant drama. At the same time, she distances herself from her actual family, which has more timely things going on: shifting farm economics, and a son joining the army just in time to be shipped off to the early days of war in the Middle East. Both families erupt into chaos soon enough, and in the middle Tassie finds herself in college lust with a super-sketchy guy. (This plot line is the weakest, but has some interesting meditations on the nature of love.)

The part that actually made me cry wasn't any of the somewhat soapy twists of the plot, but rather a quick, devastating moment involving Tassie and her brother. I can't spoil it, but it was just so unexpected that it hit me hard in the solar plexus. That's how Moore got me with her short story too--taking a sad moment, but writing it so unsentimentally and perfectly that it smacks you in the face.

But don't let the mention of tears fool you: the book is sweetly funny. Tassie has a cute, pun-filled way of viewing the world, and Moore's language is always spot-on. I feel extremely lucky to have scored an advance copy (after waiting several years for this book), and like Jacob, I'm quite sad that it'll be a long time before the next one.

For anyone interested, the book is excerpted in this week's New Yorker.

It's hard to narrow down specific passages for this one, but here are some I liked especially:

"I did not have any good solid plans for the long-term--no bad plans either, no plans at all--and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school) sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior--my life was open and ready and free--but that did not make it any less lonely."

"Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?"

"'Hello,' he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He glanced at my face and then away....I had seen this exact same expression and movement before--where? (Edward. I'd seen it the first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love--the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love. And then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away."

"I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them."

"I had never eaten such intricately prepared food before, and doing so in this kind of mournful, prayerful solitude, in a public place, where no one but I was seated without a companion, made each bite sing and roar in my mouth. Still, it was an odd experience for me, alone in the darkening evening, to have the palate so cared for and the spirit so untouched. It was a condition of prayerless worship. Endless communion. Gospel-less church."