A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, 2009)
Lorrie Moore’s much-anticipated third novel features Tassie, a geeky, disconnected 20-year old from rural Wisconsin who, enrolled at a nearby college, lands a job as a nanny for a white family who is trying to adopt a black child, and a new world of “wordless racial experiences” thereby unfolds. The ensuing plot rides a strong undercurrent of local as well as national issues, tethered to a post-9/11 America wedged-in between wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Moore’s writing is still playful, some of her humor loses its subtlety, and the narrative isn’t jump-started until the last 1/3 of the book when a truckload of vicious backstory is finally unleashed, and a string of life traumas draws the story to a dreadful close. In the end the novel is not as spectacular as I hoped and ends hopeless, depressing and gray (8/10).
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