Lorrie’ Moore’s Delayed Punch is a Doozie
“A Gate At The Stairs,” Lorrie Moore (Knopf, $25.95)
Fans of Lorrie Moore have been waiting for a new book from this masterful, ironic writer. It has been 11 years since her last collection and 15 since Moore produced a novel. Her new novel, “A Gate At The Stairs” does not disappoint [Dash] but it does take a while to work its insidious potency.
Moore is a wry and clever cultural critic. She is a genius with word games and puns, which flit through her fiction like fireflies. Her characters are sardonic, self-aware, if a bit chastened by life. If they expect, they do not expect too much and their derision blunts their emotion until something so real upends their cheeky apathy.
“A Gate At The Stairs” starts off with what appears to be a plot from a Lifetime movie: a young college student named Tassie Keltjin from a Midwest potato farm takes a job as a nanny for a rich, slightly neurotic woman named Sarah Brink and her polished-if-distant husband. The nanny job is predicated on certain conditions, including a demand to accompany the couple to the adoption agency from which they will adopt their new child.
This is the first of Sarah’s many intrusions into Tassie’s relatively narrow life. Had Tassie been less of a pun-maven, less playful or verbally adroit, she might have been more alert to the perils of the high-maintenance, elitist Sarah. Something is amiss with Sarah and her edgy, oh-so-politically correct family. If Tassie were not so involved in her own circumspect life, she might have been more prepared for the catastrophic blow that ensues. This is a book that saunters about with the guileless but slightly guarded narrative of a college sophomore. When the inevitable horror comes, it does so with a carelessness and banality that is harrowing. All of tragedy is understandable —until it is not. This is a creepily built up book by Moore, and one of her best.