Book Review: The Gate at the Stairs
I promised Jody that I would post a review of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, but I keep putting it off.
It has some truly astonishing, wonderful passages, elegant and haunting. I think my favorite is the description of Tassie, the main character, eating dinner by herself at a fancy restaurant the night before it will close. But overall, I didn’t like it. Moore is too in love with her own wordplay (and when you listen to it as an audiobook, as I did, you can’t skim past these sections the way you’d do on paper), and she puts things into her characters’ mouths that I just don’t believe that they would say. (Tassie is supposed to have never taken a taxi at the start of the book, let alone have flown on a plane, and yet she is credited with all sorts of metaphors connecting things to phenomena she’d never have seen.)
And the plot twists start out implausible, and eventually get so bizarre — not only does Tassie dress up as an owl to chase away mice from her father’s salad green fields, she keeps the owl costume on while she plays music and rides her scooter around town — that I started to wonder if I was supposed to conclude that she was mentally ill and an unreliable narrator, that none of the book should be believed. At least that would explain why her Jewish mother would make hamentaschen for Hanukah.
In getting ready to write this entry, I pulled up the rave reviews of the book from both the New York Times and the Washington Post that had led me to buy it in the first place. Both reviewers clearly saw the same flaws that I see: Kakatuni talks about the plot twists as “clumsy” and “fumbles,” while Charles calls the wordplay “too clever by half” and the descriptions “polished to distracting brilliance.” But both of them ultimately loved the book, and feel that it offers profound insights into the human condition. I didn’t.
December 31st, 1969 at 7:00 pm
February 21st, 2010 at 12:00 am
Yep. I admired the writing, but ultimately didn't like it. And the fancy restaurant scene drove me crazy, because I kept wondering how Tassie was going to pay for it.
February 21st, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Whew. I read those rave reviews myself, and really thought I must have lost all my ability to appreciate good books.
Or at least good adult books, since I seem to do just fine with well-reviewed children’s books.
Inquiring minds want to know: how much snow is still on the ground up there? I presume a lot, but haven’t seen much discussion of snowcover lately.
(We had 60-degree temps today, but there are still tiny bits of piles left from where we cleared the snow off our driveway on January 29th. This qualifies as wild for NC.)
February 22nd, 2010 at 9:13 am
I loved it. Lorri Moore lives in Madison and the part I loved was how she so brilliantly captured our city. It’s funny because she is not adored locally the way the NYTimes adores her. Their fawning adoration bugs a lot of people up here. I can see how the audio book would be tough – I did skim some of the longer soliloquies…but overall thought it was very good.