Take a photo of a barcode or cover
scarpuccia 's review for:
A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
On the evidence of this book Lorrie Moore is a much better sentence writer than she is a novelist or a storyteller. Essentially this read like the diary of a country girl uprooted to a hip college town with three dramatic events forcibly shoehorned in to give it some dramatic foundation. Each of these three events, which I can't give away without spoiling what little plot there is, possess a one in a five million chance of happening in the life of an individual; that all three happen to our narrator seemed little short of science fiction. Our narcissistic narrator with her faux scattiness, her satirical Sylvia Plath acolyte persona though is presented as a magnet for life altering events. An example I can give of the clumsy artistry of this novel is when the narrator's employer asks her to look after a poisonous concoction she has made to remove stains. Why she has made this is a mystery. And there's no reason on earth why she needs to remove this concoction from her own freezer and give it to our narrator to put in her freezer. Knowing how dipsy our narrator is (ironically if she was really so dipsy and inattentive she wouldn't have been able to write this narrative which showcases how attentive she is to everything happening around her) we know she will omit to tell her flatmate about the gunge. As a piece of dramatic foreshadowing it's predictable and hammy. The poisoning of her flatmate doesn't even serve a purpose in the book. It's another disconnected comic anecdote of which there are many. Like our narrator, as a grown woman, dressing up in a bird costume to run in front of her father's tractor to warn the mice; or her climbing into a coffin with the corpse and staying there while it is carried to the cemetery. Our narrator though loves resorting to the attention seeking theatre of a child. Her problem is she can't grow up.
Its most interesting aspect is its criticism of white liberal America. The problem here is that better the well-intentioned blunders and shortcomings of white liberal America than the smug satirical nihilism of the narrator. I will give kudos to Lorrie Moore for creating such an obnoxious narcissistic narrator, except I'm not sure this was her intention. When she turns down a date with the creepy husband of her employer at the end I think you're supposed to feel she has achieved maturity but my feeling was the pair deserved each other and would make a good match. On the plus side there were lots of great sentences. It's interesting to learn she seems to favour short stories as I can imagine her being much better suited to this form. As a novelist I'm afraid I found her essentially ham-fisted and irritating.
Its most interesting aspect is its criticism of white liberal America. The problem here is that better the well-intentioned blunders and shortcomings of white liberal America than the smug satirical nihilism of the narrator. I will give kudos to Lorrie Moore for creating such an obnoxious narcissistic narrator, except I'm not sure this was her intention. When she turns down a date with the creepy husband of her employer at the end I think you're supposed to feel she has achieved maturity but my feeling was the pair deserved each other and would make a good match. On the plus side there were lots of great sentences. It's interesting to learn she seems to favour short stories as I can imagine her being much better suited to this form. As a novelist I'm afraid I found her essentially ham-fisted and irritating.