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3.16 AVERAGE
3.16 AVERAGE
What did I just read? I really can't figure out why some books are picked for the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. In A Gate at the Stairs, a fiftyish author is trying to write about a twenty-year-old co-ed and failing miserably. Tassie wasn't really sympathetic or believable to me. Her job as a nanny seemed thrown in because there wasn't any closure with her experiences with Sarah and Mary-Emma. Edward's characterizations were flat and he turned out to be a
Oh well, I can put another checkmark in my 1001-Books and hope that the next one is better. I hesitated between 1 and 2 stars. Many people did like this book and it wasn't completely unredeemable but it really wasn't for me. Honestly, a 1.5 is my real rating. I personally didn't like it but the writing wasn't horrible. It just didn't reel me in.
Spoiler
pervert. Who calls the 20-year-old nanny after the divorce to ask her out to dinner? That was absolutely unnecessary and a terrible ending.Oh well, I can put another checkmark in my 1001-Books and hope that the next one is better. I hesitated between 1 and 2 stars. Many people did like this book and it wasn't completely unredeemable but it really wasn't for me. Honestly, a 1.5 is my real rating. I personally didn't like it but the writing wasn't horrible. It just didn't reel me in.
relaxing
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This one I'd give four and 3/4, so I'll round up.
Lorrie Moore's prose is gorgeous. She somehow manages to tell an incredibly sad story with tremendous humor. That's no small feat! I read this book hungrily, loving the language just a bit more than the storyline. My only complaint is that I got so invested in the main storyline that I felt a bit cheated when it ended rather abruptly. Fortunately, Moore's prose is gorgeous enough to have kept me engaged anyway. I definitely recommend this one!
I have to preserve this excerpt of Moore's brilliant and funny prose that I love so much, so here it is:
"...I'd brought only one book, the Zen poems, and was finding their obliqueness fatiguing and ripe for parody. I decided instead to investigate the official Judeo-Christian comedy, and pulled the Gideon Bible from the nightstand drawer. I started at the beginning, day one, when God created the heavens and the earth and gave them form. There'd been no form before. Just amorphous blobbery. God then said let there be light, in order to get a little dynamic thing going between night and day, though the moon and stars and sun were not the generators of this light but merely a kind of middle management, supervisors, glorified custodians, since they were not created until later -- day four -- as can happen with bureaucracy, even of the cosmic sort. Still, I thought of all the songs that had been written about these belated moon and stars and sun, compared to songs about form. Not one good song about form! Sometimes a week just got more inspiring as it went along. Still, it was truly strange that there was morning and night on day one but the sun wasn't created until day four. Perhaps God didn't have a proofreader until, like, day forty-seven, but by that time all sorts of weird things were happening. Perhaps he was really, completely on his own until then, making stuff up and then immediately forgetting what he'd made up already..."
Lorrie Moore's prose is gorgeous. She somehow manages to tell an incredibly sad story with tremendous humor. That's no small feat! I read this book hungrily, loving the language just a bit more than the storyline. My only complaint is that I got so invested in the main storyline that I felt a bit cheated when it ended rather abruptly. Fortunately, Moore's prose is gorgeous enough to have kept me engaged anyway. I definitely recommend this one!
I have to preserve this excerpt of Moore's brilliant and funny prose that I love so much, so here it is:
"...I'd brought only one book, the Zen poems, and was finding their obliqueness fatiguing and ripe for parody. I decided instead to investigate the official Judeo-Christian comedy, and pulled the Gideon Bible from the nightstand drawer. I started at the beginning, day one, when God created the heavens and the earth and gave them form. There'd been no form before. Just amorphous blobbery. God then said let there be light, in order to get a little dynamic thing going between night and day, though the moon and stars and sun were not the generators of this light but merely a kind of middle management, supervisors, glorified custodians, since they were not created until later -- day four -- as can happen with bureaucracy, even of the cosmic sort. Still, I thought of all the songs that had been written about these belated moon and stars and sun, compared to songs about form. Not one good song about form! Sometimes a week just got more inspiring as it went along. Still, it was truly strange that there was morning and night on day one but the sun wasn't created until day four. Perhaps God didn't have a proofreader until, like, day forty-seven, but by that time all sorts of weird things were happening. Perhaps he was really, completely on his own until then, making stuff up and then immediately forgetting what he'd made up already..."
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I kept hoping this book was going to go somewhere. It didn't.
A Gate at the Stairs is the story of Tassie Keltjin,the daughter of a potato farmer in rural Wisconsin. In the days before 9-11, she is a college student At the University of Wisconsin in Troy, Wisconsin. Like most college students she is cash poor, and so she begins looking for a job to keep herself in clothes and food and heat. She applies to be the nanny for Sarah and Edward Thornwood-Brink, a couple in the process of adopting a biracial baby. From very early on Tassie can sense that something is not quite right with Sarah and Edward. Their manner is just-off from normal, their interactions are intimate and cold at the same time. Tassie never imagines, however, the secret that will come to affect her life and the life of the little girl, Mary-Emma. This novel is a strange, uncomfortable coming of age story, one that left me feeling unsettled, and unsure I really got what Moore was trying to convey.
Moore's writing is rich. Her language shows a depth of thought and a flair for metaphor greater than any other author I've read recently. There are long passages where Tassie is thinking about her life and events in the story that would be worthy of a circus contortionist in the way they bend and twist, making seemingly random connections into something meaningful. This was really interesting for the first three quarters of the novel, but over time I found myself wishing for a more straight-forward narrative. But then, about three quarters of the way through the novel is where I started to feel like the story I thought I was reading was not actually the story Moore was telling.
While most of the story revolves around Tassie's relationship with Sarah and Mary-Emma, there are other, seemingly disparate, stories woven throughout. Tassie has a secret relationship with a fellow student who turns out to belong to a fanatical Islamist organization. When he disappears from her life suddenly, I expected there to be some fall-out for her, but he just fades from the story. When she loses Mary-Emma, I expected there to be some resolution to that storyline, but we never hear what becomes of the little girl. The loss of her brother is the only one in which we get a sense of how that loss affected not just Tassie but her parents as well-and that is the last quarter of the book. The theme of loss is the only constant throughout the story, but it is only with that last loss that we see exactly how deeply Tassie feels her sorrow.
One thing that struck me about this book is all of the white liberal-guilt and angst portrayed by Moore through the interracial adoption group that Sarah and Edward become involved in. The conversations that Tassie overhears while playing upstairs with the children during their meetings are circular, in turns angry and defensive, and probably very authentic, despite seeming stereotypical. The themes never change, and most of the white parents seem to feel that their adoption of the black and biracial children is under-appreciated by people who question their ability to raise children of color. Complaints about people's comments on the street, or the advice they get from well-meaning people that end up sounding like back-handed compliments, are all fodder for their insecurity and self-pity. They bring up issues of race and class, even within liberal communities, that people believe have long been subdued by inclusiveness and acceptance. Moore seems to be pointing out the naivete of people who believe we have entered a post-racial era, where issues of race have mostly been addressed.
Moore's writing is rich. Her language shows a depth of thought and a flair for metaphor greater than any other author I've read recently. There are long passages where Tassie is thinking about her life and events in the story that would be worthy of a circus contortionist in the way they bend and twist, making seemingly random connections into something meaningful. This was really interesting for the first three quarters of the novel, but over time I found myself wishing for a more straight-forward narrative. But then, about three quarters of the way through the novel is where I started to feel like the story I thought I was reading was not actually the story Moore was telling.
While most of the story revolves around Tassie's relationship with Sarah and Mary-Emma, there are other, seemingly disparate, stories woven throughout. Tassie has a secret relationship with a fellow student who turns out to belong to a fanatical Islamist organization. When he disappears from her life suddenly, I expected there to be some fall-out for her, but he just fades from the story. When she loses Mary-Emma, I expected there to be some resolution to that storyline, but we never hear what becomes of the little girl. The loss of her brother is the only one in which we get a sense of how that loss affected not just Tassie but her parents as well-and that is the last quarter of the book. The theme of loss is the only constant throughout the story, but it is only with that last loss that we see exactly how deeply Tassie feels her sorrow.
One thing that struck me about this book is all of the white liberal-guilt and angst portrayed by Moore through the interracial adoption group that Sarah and Edward become involved in. The conversations that Tassie overhears while playing upstairs with the children during their meetings are circular, in turns angry and defensive, and probably very authentic, despite seeming stereotypical. The themes never change, and most of the white parents seem to feel that their adoption of the black and biracial children is under-appreciated by people who question their ability to raise children of color. Complaints about people's comments on the street, or the advice they get from well-meaning people that end up sounding like back-handed compliments, are all fodder for their insecurity and self-pity. They bring up issues of race and class, even within liberal communities, that people believe have long been subdued by inclusiveness and acceptance. Moore seems to be pointing out the naivete of people who believe we have entered a post-racial era, where issues of race have mostly been addressed.
This book is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It took a while for me to get through it after flying through about 2/3 of it. I won't give anything away but there are two rather devastating events toward the end of the novel. It's the first I've read by Lorrie Moore. Her writing here is marked by acute observation and strong imagery. Tassie Keljin is what you might annoyingly call 'quirky,' but not in an artificial way that I find in stories like those of Miranda July where I feel like she is trying to be as weird and amusing as possible. (I tried reading No One Belongs Here More than You , and felt like each story was trying to out-quirk the next.) I wouldn't recommend this to everyone because I found it put me in a rather melancholy mood at times, but there are some very humorous passages. Tassie's Mom is a riot as is here Dad. Loved the passage where her Mom is commenting on their small town's alleged visits from extraterrestrials.
I wanted to love this book because Moore is a phenomenal writer, but her overabundance of metaphors and similes were just too distracting. The characters were not compelling and for 3/4 of the book, nothing was happening. There were too many major events that came out of the blue, and were then quickly dismissed. Every once in a while there was a sentence that made you want to cut it out of the book and paste it on the wall because Moore is that good at writing about the human condition, but the novel format just doesn't work for her. She should stick to short stories.
Devastating, raw, and beautifully written at all points. A painful book that offers small bits of redemption and a tenuous possibility for healing.