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A review by somanybookstoread
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
5.0
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..."