Kidlife crisis
A Gate at the Stairs
By Lorrie Moore
Knopf
Some years pass as just another twelve months of life, and other years render a life changed forever. Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin is about to experience the latter.
Tassie was raised in a rural agricultural community in the midwest as something of an outsider, living on a high-end farm known for its heirloom potatoes with a Jewish mom and a slightly eccentric dad. As an undergrad in college in Wisconsin, she’s having her mind expanded and loving it. By day, there are classes on Soundtracks to War Movies and Intro to Sufism, and by night, she plays bass along to the Violent Femmes and Sleater-Kinney. But she retains a certain level of innocence—the best use she can find for her roommate’s vibrator is to stir a drink.
As the narrator, Tassie’s voice is the book—and it’s perfectly realized. She is in turn self-conscious and self-deprecating, wise and naive, with an underlying dry wit. “I had donated my plasma several times for cash, but the last time I had tried, the clinic had turned me away, saying my plasma was cloudy from my having eaten cheese the night before,” Moore writes. “Cloudy plasma! I would be the bass guitarist!”
She decides to get a more reliable source of income and seeks a job as a babysitter, even though she freely admits babies tend to bore her. She meets a 40-something, upper-middle class couple, Sarah and Edward Brink-Thornwood, who are East Coast transplants caught in faltering marriage. Sarah owns a restaurant that serves outrageous foodie concoctions like carmelized sage and Edward, a researcher, seems lost in his own head, but Tassie finds them urbane and alluring.
As Tassie accompanies them as they go about adopting a biracial baby, she gets a life lesson on class and race. And what starts out as a source for extra cash slowly begins to take over her life, as she gets drawn in by the baby and the mix of glamour and mystery that surrounds the couple.
As Tassie comes into her own, she feels removed from her old life—she can’t understand why her aimless brother contemplates joining the military. And then there’s Reynaldo, her Brazilian boyfriend and first love, who seems not at all trustworthy.
Moore is worshipped by English majors for Birds of America, her best-selling collection of short stories, and this is her first novel in over ten years. Her writing here is precise and beautiful, but with a constant sense that something is about to go very, very wrong.
It’s a book with a fairly narrow scope that takes on the larger question of life after September 11th. The action is set far away from Ground Zero, but the sense of unease and loss of connection proves to be universal.