A Gate at the Stairs
I’ve finished this book and it nonetheless remains a mystery to me — and that is probably why I love it so, so much.
Something about the back blurb reads very celebrity book club-ish. We’ve got a college student who starts nannying for a “glamorous and mysterious family.” It’s “a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America.” I was getting Little Fires Everywhere vibes from the book’s superficial markers. (Coulda been the similar-ish cover, though.)
A Gate at the Stairs is Lorrie Moore’s third novel and takes place in the aftermath of 9/11. Life was confusing then, just as it is — in particular — now. Anyone looking for the aforementioned celeb book club version of whatever they think this novel should be will be confused as well. For instance, characters that we assume play a sizable arc-like role in the narrative…might not. Similarly, readers might be primed to attempt to draw a thematic straight line between the race-oriented discussions held by a group of parents to conflict in the Middle East. No such luck: Life isn’t a five-paragraph essay to unravel, and people flit in and out of our lives all the time.
Moore lets her characters engage in subtle wordplay throughout that brings attention to how things may sound the same but be totally different objects or phrases. And that people’s names can change. And that sometimes we try on the language of another. All this doesn’t have to “mean” anything. It just is.
Here, Moore is giving these words to narrator Tessie in reference to language structure and regional colloquialisms, but it fits, too, when trying to wrap one’s arms around A Gate at the Stairs in some sort of tidy, definitive way: “It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only, almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp.”
{Highly, highly recommend! And I’d love to discuss A Gate at the Stairs with anyone who has read it.}
originally published on instagram