I have to disagree with our esteemed editor-in-chief on this one. Yes, a handful of the descriptions are overwrought, and someone should have gently excised them. Yes, it's got bits of over-cleverness (I saw them as parody). But any book today that gives me a fresh way to see the world in just about every paragraph leaves me humbled and grateful.
There's a bit of distance in Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, but it's the distance of a college student standing at the entrance to the adult world and peering in. Tassie has the clear-eyed confusion of any bright kid who's grown up on a farm and is now navigating her way through sophistication, bigotry, self-conscious liberalism, secrets, disguised identities, violence, mysticism, adultery, and grief. Her matter-of-fact responses, attempts at wit, and honest confusion are shortcut reminders of just how screwed up adults can get. And Moore's descriptions of nature, emotion, and sensation caught me with that sense of rightness you usually get only in the deftest poetry.
Tassie's uncomplicated love for the toddler she's babysitting warms the story, and then her detached but immense fondness for her little brother chills it, because in the end, she fails him. They both grew up yearning to fly, and he plummeted fast, while she set goals so low, she never even got a view.
Everybody fails, in this book; you get the sense that maturity means simply accepting that. But the novel itself? A soaring triumph. Simple and complex, fresh and vivid, funny and tragic--it's so nuanced, it could be a speech by Obama. And I loved every page of it.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
