A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

From our perspective that semester, the events of September--we did not yet call them 9/11--seemed both near and far. Marching poli-sci majors chanted on the quads and the pedestrian malls, "The chickens have come home to roost! The chickens have come home to roost!" When I could contemplate them at all--the chickens, the roosting--it was as if in a craning crowd, through glass, the way I knew (from Art History) people stared at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre: La Gioconda! its very name like a snake, its sly, tight smile encased at a distance but studied for portentous flickers. It was, like September itself, a cat's mouth full of canaries. My roommate, Murph--a nose-pierced, hinky-toothed blonde from Dubuque, who used black soap and black dental floss and whose quick opinions were impressively harsh (she pronounced Dubuque "Du-ba-cue") and who once terrified her English teachers by saying the character she admired most in all of literature was Dick Hickock in In Cold Blood--had met her boyfriend on September tenth, and when she woke up at his place, she'd phoned me, in horror and happiness, the television blaring. "I know, I know," she said, her voice shrugging into the phone. "It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had to be done."

After three books, I see what Lorrie Moore is up to. She wants to make us laugh, and then devastate us. We're not supposed to see it. I'm onto you, Lorrie. In this case, the set-up centers on Tassie Keltijn, the daughter of a small organic farmer who enters a college that looks and sounds suspiciously like the University of Wisconsin. Tassie takes a job as a nanny from a woman named Sarah, but she starts before the baby arrives: Tassie and her husband Edward are trying to adopt. She's whisked off on a flight to Green Bay to pick up a biracial child who becomes Tassie's charge. Tassie becomes enamored with the girl, who begins as Mary, extended to Mary-Emma, then just "Emmie," and she finds herself fascinated by the steely, middle-aged Sarah, who seems alternately impossibly self-assured and strangely desperate.

A Gate at the Stairs has all the hallmarks of a coming-of-age novel: Tassie, on her own for the first time, looking to Sarah and her unconventional family, contemplating Sarah as a model--or a warning. Tassie is wry and jocular, in a way that sometimes sounds a little too much like Lorrie Moore, and not enough like a 20-year-old, even a particular observant or knowledgeable one. Moore has a real gift for the humorous detail, one that thrives on a brisk pace: not every joke lands, but before you have time to think about it, she's onto the next one. And Tassie is growing up in a rapidly changing world: 9/11 has rapidly transformed the country, and though the Twin Towers and the war may seem distant from this Wisconsin college town, it intrudes upon Tassie's life in surprising ways, not least of which is her younger brother's decision to join the army when he graduates from high school. 

From there Moore ushers the reader into a series of utter shocks--spoiler alert: first, Tassie's new Brazilian boyfriend Reynaldo turns out not to be Brazilian at all, or Reynaldo, but a young Muslim en route to vague missions in the U.S. Sarah admits to Tassie that she has a horrible secret: she and Edward once had different names, which they changed after running over their own son in a horrible and negligent car accident. (The parallel between Reynaldo and Sarah--the hidden identity, the assumed name--stands out, and contribute to the feeling that Tassie's life has destabilized, become uncertain.) When the adoption agency discovers their deceit, Mary-Emma is taken away from them, and never seen again. Finally, Tassie's brother is one of the first servicemen killed in Afghanistan. In one bold scene, Tassie climbs into her brother's coffin, feeling his mangled body, stuffed with replacement parts because he was blown apart, and is accidentally whisked away inside the coffin to the graveside. It's a scene that probably shouldn't work, but the fact that it does is testament to Moore's writerly skill.

I've had a similar experience with all the Moore novels I've read, which include this, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams: I start impressed by the writing, if a little impatient with how loose and silly it can be, and by the end I'm absolutely devastated. Moore writes like that, I suppose, because sometimes life is like that, with humor and grief mixed in unequal measure.