Moore is excellent at the foolish, touching, fresh intensities of first lust. She is superb, too at the combination of achingly sensuous tenderness and equally aching tedium that go into looking after a young child. There is plenty to admire and plenty to make one think in this novel. Indeed, there is, at times, almost too much.
Lorrie Moore’s — or Tassie’s — narrative voice is restless, flitting from joke to joke like a zig-zagging fly dodging invisible swatters. There is, it is true, a point to this. Moore is interested in the psychology of jokes: from the truly juvenile jokes of very small children, through the regressively puerile ones of nervous teenagers (the hysterical laughter of teenage girls, as Moore notes, is never replicated after 30) to family in-jokes, Jewish humour, the Ephron-esque wisecracks of the damaged middle-aged (‘ “the problem with seeing one’s marriage as a farce”, she continued, “is that all the slamming doors are in your heart” ’), down to the surreal thoughts that intrude into moments of alienated depression, or the more severe dislocations of profound grief.
Moore is particularly brilliant at the last categories. Until the cold snap of tragedy concentrates the narrative, however, Tassie’s voice seems all over the place. Some of the riffs — about Midwestern food, Midwestern adolescents, God lacking a good proof-reader — seem slightly rechauffé (what Sarah would call ‘home-cooking’, which is ‘restaurant-ese for throwing something back in the pot when it has landed on the floor’); and some of the jokes try too hard, becoming self-consciously wacky (dwarf irises and bearded irises, Tassie muses, call for bearded dwarves).
This relentless cascade is surprisingly hard to read over a prolonged period; and I began to wonder whether Moore’s dislocating jokiness might be better suited to the short story: her prize-winning story of taking a baby to a cancer clinic evoked anxiety of sickening intensity in a small, joke-crammed span. But the best parts of A Gate at the Stairs perform the same uneasy miracle. In retrospect, one can then appreciate more clearly the register of the restless early part of the novel: trying too hard, making comic routines of one’s origins, after all, are part of being young. In another novel, they would have been part of Tassie finding her own voice; in Moore’s universe, however, there is no truth of self to find. ‘Life … skittered and blew. It was a mound of random trash, even as you moved through the hours like a ghost invited to enjoy a sparkling day at the beach.’
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