Lorrie Moore has, until now, been best known for her short stories, collected in such works as Birds of America. They are stories largely about women on the edge of loneliness, neurotic and Cassandra-like, full of vim and wit. They are blunt, bold women who blurt awkward truths, and they are often semi-desperate for love. They are protagonists bent just slightly askew by fierce independence – coming along, as they do, at what might be called the tail end of feminism. Intelligent, professional women who suffer grand longings for romance and sometimes for children, and yet they are, absurdly, no-nonsense and cannily clear-eyed. Often in their thirties or forties, Moore's hapless women are caught in the no man's land of no available men, with the biological clock/bomb ticking – and they're out there, pretty much alone – armed only with a wicked sense of humour and a piercing insight.
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore, Bond Street/Doubleday Canada, 322 pages, $29.95
In Moore's third novel, A Gate at the Stairs, this kind of woman makes an appearance in the character of Sarah Brink. Sarah is a chef who runs her own restaurant, and the soon-to-be mother of an adopted biracial toddler. She hires the young Tassie Keltjin as a nanny. Along the way, Sarah, somewhat inadvertently, initiates Tassie into in the ways of being a woman, and becomes an unwitting, wavering guide through the minefields of love and motherhood, betrayal, loss, self-reliance and sadness. Sarah Brink is as vivid as any character one could hope to come across in a social comedy by Jane Austen, and just as poignant and multifaceted.
But it's Tassie Keltjin, this novel's voice and moral compass, who grips the reader and doesn't let go.
Moore's writing is full of irony and wordplay, fast quips, snappy dialogue, broad-sweeping slapstick and the deeper, darker sort of joke that makes us hee-haw at those moments that can turn out – in a flash – to be sinister and stabbing. It's the kind of laughter that ambushes, the kind that reveals unexpected, painful truth. This is dark/bright writing, affecting and stripped down.
Though no sentence is wasted, Moore's is not the minimalism popular in the 1980s, when her stories began to garner critical praise. There's too much jam-packed into each line. She makes language do double duty; her language stands back from itself to explore the nature of language. How a name can alter a thing, how slippery meaning can be, the unavoidable folly of trying to pin down what we feel, what we want, who we are, how we love.
The novel is full of what critic James Wood calls “the language of the world,” a kind of speak or lingo that defines and parodies notions of class, or enclave, cult or professional community; in other words, the stuff of great satire. Here is foodie lingo, for example, from a menu in Sarah's restaurant: “And at last, as I looked down through some of the most amazing writing I had ever read, everything shaved, braised, truffled and ‘finished with' – cipollini confit! Beauty heart radish! Horseradish aioli! – there were my father's potatoes: roasted Bo Keltjin Farm butterballs and fingerlings.”
Moore dispenses with the more mechanical demands of plot ... quite effortlessly
Or the cant and clichés that burble up from the support group for parents of biracial children that Sarah forms to deal with racism.
A snippet from such a meeting: “‘I'm here to representing the Pottawatomie, the Oneida, the Chippewa, the Winnebago and the Ho-Chunk. I am here to tell you we weren't successfully integrated because we weren't given real jobs, let alone intimate jobs in your homes and on your property. Only on high bridges and tall office buildings. Your relationship to us from the beginning wasn't even exploitive. It was homicidal.'
“‘Dave, sit down. You're mostly white.'
