A Gate at the Stairs: 'Not a single sentence is wasted.’ Elizabeth Day Paperback – 22 April 2010

I can't remember having loved and admired a modern novel as much as I did A Gate at the Stairs in years. It fizzes with linguistic brio and glows with observational detail. Clearly one of its main concerns is meaning (of life and of language) and in the early stages there's an almost adolescent delight in punning; later on, the mutability of language becomes a tragic cacophony of baffling acronyms. The social comedy is deft and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny: I found myself thinking that it was as if Jane Austen had been brought back to the American mid-West in the early part of the 21st century, with the shadow of 9/11 a rebuke to those critics who dismiss Austen for not writing about the Napoleonic wars. (Moore, it must be said, invokes Charlotte Bronte rather than Austen, however.)This is a distinctly un-American novel, too, I think. If words and meaning have a habit of shifting, then so, too, do people and events; and if the `Great American Novel' is about fulfilling your personal destiny, about becoming whoever you wish to become, then A Gate at the Stairs suggests there are too many uncertainties for us often to know ourselves. The gate at one set of stairs is there supposedly to guard a baby who has multiple identities (birth, race, gender) at least three different names and four competing `mothers'.The novel is not perfect: the Wednesday meetings lost their edge and became quickly repetitive (but perhaps that's the point). However, the quality of writing is extraordinary, the imagery soars and Tassie, the narrator, has a winning voice and a compelling story to tell. Absolutely brilliant.

Narrator and heroine Tassie Keltjin, while from a not particularly intellectual family is clearly an extremely bright pupil at an American University. She is erudite, witty, ironical, and tells her tale with convincing skill. Which, of course, is a bit of a problem because the reader may occasionally doubt if she could exist and may also ponder the fact that, while she is very enjoyable and involving to read, in 'real life' she might be rather hard to take. The main portion of her story concerns her part time job of looking after a little girl of mixed race who had been adopted by a rather strange white middle class couple. This provides a platform for observing racist attitudes. There are many other strands to the story, concerning Tassie's perception of her home and her family, her friendships, the young man she finds herself attached to, and eventually her brother's involvement in the Afghan war. So the novel becomes more and more dramatic and, in my opinion, less and less credible. And yet Tassie, one supposes, is not an unreliable narrator. So we have a marvellously written novel, purportedly by an exceptionally gifted but very young student, with a multifaceted plot line. A lot of it is funny, quite a bit is grim, and some seems deliberately nasty. But what starts out as quite a gripping read with some complexity of characterisation ends in a somewhat fragment manner and is rather a struggle to complete. Which is a shame because if the author had left out one or two of the later plot developments I think it would have been a far superior novel, and a more balanced study of the interaction between character and social context. And while I am sure that the author is not at fault the extraordinarily fulsome praise quoted on the cover of my copy is over-egging the pudding a bit!

Tassie, our narrator for this new novel by Lorrie Moore, previously better known for her short stories, is a young student in her early twenties, who has escaped the boredom of her background in the mid West provinces of Dellacrosse, and come to be a student in the university town of Troy. She takes a part time job as a babysitter with a busy middle class couple called Sarah and Edward. The only thing is that there is no baby to sit as yet. Sarah and Edward are part way though an adoption process, and are keen to have Tassie on board every step of the way.She thinks that Sarah especially is a bit sad. She sees to be a middle aged woman desperate to have a child, but not so desperate to tear herself away from her up market restaurant business. Sarah is viewed through the youthful eyes of Tassie on their first meeting - `Her earrings were buttons of deepest orange, her leggings mahogany, her sweater rust-coloured, and her lips maroonish brown. She looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment'. On one of their trips to view a prospective child to adopt Tassie begins to feel Sarah's sadness. `These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.'Tassie's world view is very amusing in places. Her observations send her mind whirring to past places, people and facts. At one of their meetings, the woman from the adoption agency leaves the room to make drinks and Tassie notes that `she returned to the room, carrying a tray with two bowls: one piled with creamers and one jammed with yellow packets of sweetener that I'd learned from friends had been invented accidentally by chemists during a reformulation of insecticide. Death and dessert, sweetness and doom, lay side by side: I was coming to see that this was not uncommon.'Moore's descriptive powers are wonderful, and add a really rich contextual backdrop to the story. Tassie is a very engaging character, and her thought process asides from the main action are relayed to the reader in marvellous detail. On accession, however, they do seem a bit distracting, as the narrative plot gets a little lost in their midst.The central story of the emerging relationships between Sarah, her oft absent husband Edward, Tassie and their new charge Mary-Emma. Tassie and Emmie (as Sarah likes her new daughter to be referred to as) is very tender. And it could possibly have been made more of by Moore towards the end of the book. Things do not go smoothly in the household, and as the fragile happiness unravels Tassie finds herself at the heart of it.The storytelling does loose its way a bit in the latter stages, the central story seems to be lost somewhat, with a lot of loose ends not tied up in detail. Possibly this is due to it being Moore's first foray into the world of the novel. Nevertheless it is a captivating story, well told in the main, with brilliant and amusing detail throughout.

nowhere near as good as lorrie moore's short stories. i have absolutely no doubt that this will be seen, in the near future, as a terrible mis-step from a writer i've admired up until now. her short stories are great, so please don't let this mess of a novel put you off them. i'm glad other reviewers have realised how self-indulgent this book is and they will prove to be correct, whereas the sad hacks who adorn the front and back cover with their glowing reviews obviously wanted to like it so much, they couldn't perceive it for what it is.

A gate at the stairs to keep people out, to keep people in. Ms Moore is great at short stories. There are several short stories contained in this novel. In a year Tassie Keltjin's story takes her from twenty to twenty one, legally an adult. A young farm girl, she goes to the university filled with liberals, different ways of thinking, of living. Life changing. The city is a sophisticated university town filled with learning. Tassie's mother is Jewish, her father a Norwegian atheist who is a gentlemen farmer growing fancy potatoes and other vegetables for high class restaurants. His father was a college president. Tassie and her younger brother, Robert, nickname Gunny, go to a small town school, live small town lives. Again, life changes.The story begins with Tassie looking for a job as a nanny. She needs the money to stay in school. She meets Sarah Brink and husband Edward Thornwood, a scientist. The couple is from the northeast, different, more sophisticated than midwestern farm people. Sarah owns an up scale restaurant catering to well heeled clients who like exotic food. The restaurant has a fancy French name. Sarah is a good business woman who knows her restaurant, does well. Far away from small town Wisconsin. Sarah wants to adopt a baby. She will have Tassie go with her to interview moms and others involved in adoptions.Tassie goes home for the holidays such as her family observes. She loves her family, no problems. Then back to Troy and university life.Along comes a baby needing a forever family. This baby is racially mixed, black father, white mother and will be named Mary Emma. Sarah, Edward and Tassie meet the mother, go to the child's foster home. Emmie is two or almost. Sarah is delighted, Tassie falls in love with her charge, Edward is only in love with himself. It is fun meeting these characters. This book is both laugh out loud and heart breaking.Readers meet Murph, Tassie's roommate who moves in with her love leaving the apartment to Tassie. Tassie meets her boyfriend in one of her classes. She falls in love or thinks she does, a good looking young man who is not who he says he is. She babysits a bunch of kids,. Every Wednesday evening, Sarah opens her home to parents of children, mixed race ,black, adopted from other races for discussion. The parents talk about their experiences, problems, worrying about kids being accepted. Voices drift up the stairs while Tassie is playing with and entertaining all these kids.Murph and Tassie become good friends, Murph returns to the apartment, both girls are without men at the time. In the year of the book, Tassie loses characters she cares much about, characters she barely knows, characters who just drift through her life. This not too long novel contains several short stories dealing with other characters. Tassie goes back to the farm to recuperate from life. She goes to the town swimming pool, sees a girl she had gone to high school with. She waves. The girl doesn't remember her. How quickly we are forgotten. There are beautiful descriptions of the countryside during the summer when Tassie goes home.

Like in her other books Lorrie Moore develops an idiosyncratic protagonist that tells a story of life in today's USA from a very individual perspective. At the same time the book combines a coming of age story with a very moving fate of people in times of war and terrorism.

The book arrived quickly and in good shape, as advertised. Looks from the binder like it was once a library book, but it is clean with no markings and in overall good condition. There are meaningful themes in the book (growing up, responsibilities, really knowing people) but the story-telling is slow. My son, who is reading it for a school assignment, is not enjoying it at all. I thought it was ok, but not worthy of the hype it had received in the NY Times Book Review when it first came out.

This book has generated so much praise that it was difficult for me not to set my expectations very high, a little too high perhaps. Anyway, A Gate At The Stairs is a good book, although I didn't think it deserved all the exhilarated comments it received.The plot is very captivating at first: Tassie, a freshman at Troy university gets a job as a part time baby-sitter for Sarah and Edward the future parents of an adopted child. Her job starts right before the adoption, with the interviews between the young mothers putting up their child for adoption and the prospective parents. Then, when all the adoption formalities are completed, she becomes a happy part-time nanny for young Mary Emma even if the attitude of the parents towards her and the child seems strange, and at times mysterious. After several months however, the parent's past catches up with them in a dreadful way.This is a good story, it is both original and appealing as usually it's the baby-sitter who becomes weird, not the parents. It also deals with interesting subjects such as marriage, adoption, education, punishment, guilt, naivety or rather thoughtlessness. However, the depth of these subjects seems to be eluded at times, as if they were too many to explore. The same applies to the characters, apart from Tassie - we never seem to grasp their fundamental nature, they always seem vague, especially the adoptive parents, which is sometimes a bit frustrating. Unless this is Lorrie Moore's way of making them mysterious to us ? It is perhaps why I wasn't moved by this book, but it's only my perception. A lot of people thought it was really moving.

Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" follows a year in the life of Tassie, a 20 year old college student. Tassie is from a small town in rural Wisconsin, and her world is expanded exponentially over the course of the novel, first by her experience in the college town of Troy, then by her employment as the nanny for a young adopted mixed race girl, and finally by her brother's experience in the military. Through all of these experiences Tassie is forced to reexamine the perspective that has shaped her life and decide who she is and what she believes.When I started reading this book I was excited--it had received all around rave reviews and I enjoyed Moore's previous work. It soon became clear however that Moore's strength lies in short stories, not in novel length works. I felt like the different sections of this novel--the book doesn't really have chapters, but rather longish sections--weren't really connected to each other, and although the characters were the same there was no continuous narrative thread to hold all of the pieces together. Not that I didn't love some of the sections--particularly the part about Emmie, the little girl Tassie nannies--put the disconnect between them was too much for me. I also finished this novel deeply depressed, which I think skews my opinion of the work as a whole. Since the fictional Tassie and I are roughly the same age, it was extremely discouraging to see one of my peers (even if she is fictional) so negative and bleak at such a young age. I know the novel is set in a dark time and there are tragic events, but the end of this novel is discouraging and so depressing, it overweighs the rest of the story.I would have a hard time recommending this book to others because it is so dark. Yes, there are some beautiful and uplifting parts, but the end of the book left me cold and depressed. Reader beware.