Lorrie Moore: A Gate At The Stairs

Moore, Lorrie (2010), A Gate at the Stairs, Vintage
ISBN 978-0-307-73942-1

A Gate at the Stairs, published in 2009, is only Lorrie Moore’s third novel, and it was published to great but not unanimous praise. Moore is one of the most highly acclaimed writers of her generation, one, however, who’s been silent for years now, publishing her last book of fiction (the story collection Birds of America), in 1998. Eleven years later, there is this novel, and I’m not sure it was worth the wait. It’s a surprisingly slight book, reading like a clever debut novel rather than like the work of an established wordsmith and recipient of a PEN/Malamud award, among several others. There is no indication that this writer has written and published several books, honing and developing her craft. The strengths of this book are strengths that you’ll be able to find in a great many flashy debuts. There’s no discernible routine in the way that characters, plots and developments are handled, nothing really works here, as far as the craft of writing a novel is concerned. A Gate at the Stairs has one big advantage, and that’s Lorrie Moore’s love for language and her incredible ability to write extraordinary sentences that are surprising, beguiling and consistently interesting. This is the oddest novel: the writing itself, the words and phrases used, this shows an enormous amount of care and instinct, there’s is dullness, too, or the occasional muddled thought that died in mid-sentence. It’s nonetheless true that you can open the book at random, and look even at innocuous sentences, and find pleasurably turned phrases, small inversions. The language seems thoughtful, using puns, allusions, and an enormous amount of brilliant images. But if you look at the broader picture, at the novel as a novel, it seems cobbled together quickly, with little care and less success. There’s nothing thoughtful about the characters or the ideas, all of which seem ramshackle. From the meager, disappointing evidence of A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore seems to me a poet manqué at best: and I see potential for this book in small, condensed portions. I’m willing to bet that could be an interesting publication. This isn’t. Not by a long stretch.

On its surface, A Gate at the Stairs appears to be a realistic tale of one girl’s coming of age in the Midwest. But it’s more than that, it’s a meditation about language and moreover, it’s almost a classic Bildungsroman, condensed into a very short period in the girl’s life, and like most novels in that mode, it’s more of a theoretical exercise than a strictly realistic one. That is one of the reasons why a reading of this novel as a plausible depiction of growing up in the Midwest is bound to be disappointing. There is little depth to any of the characters, even Tassie Keltjin, the protagonist, is a slapdash creation. As she suddenly stumbles into a series of tumultuous events, her actions often seem erratic, the reader could spend hours trying to unravel her motivations and finding a plausible impulse behind her actions. Those motivations are simply not to be had. Her actions and her behavior is necessary as part of the writer’s intellectual schemes, of Lorrie Moore’s attempt to provide a full, coherent and closed account of that crucial moment of adolescence, where we move from childhood to adulthood, in short, to show what she “leaned in college” (‘college’ being a cipher for the whole experience). The characters all seem interesting, and the story can be even moving, but it feels like a slightly skewered dream, an intellectual fantasy played in a literary key. It’s devastating, finally, for the book, that the intellectual foundations of the book are so weak, spineless, without substance, conviction or vision, since it so depends upon them. Like most classic Bildungsroman novels, the book’s protagonist is less like a chess piece moved on a board and more like the center of a web of meanings and allusions, a web that moves, turns and spins, with the movement of its protagonist. The elements of the book exist to accompany the protagonist into adulthood, they help them, test them and teach them. There are characters and events to educate, events to punish, and events to transform. In this case, however, the web is a bit wobbly, and the intellectual commitments sometimes seem as hazy and unclear as the characters’ motivations.

See, it’s not surprising that the characters lack distinctive voices, that the book seems glazed with just one unflaggingly, untiringly clever voice. The characters ceaselessly pun or provide quotable lines. The effect of the particular voice here is negative, however, since it presents the reader with an impression of a certain prim-faced cleverness. Tassie narrates the whole novel and she’s an insufferably self-satisfied little creature, a self-satisfaction fed by Lorrie Moore’s indiscriminate handling of means and events. There seems to be a lack of subtlety at work here. In crude brushstrokes, Tassie’s lessons are doled out, but unlike in most novels of this kind, it’s almost never the protagonist who suffers. People die, become terrorists, become orphans, suffer terrible pain, relationships break up and racist epithets are thrown around, in order for Tassie to learn her lessons. But Tassie herself suffers mostly in an affected, deeply Romanticist kind of way. She is an observer and suffers the exquisite pain of aesthetic disturbance. It’s her sense of superiority, her awful sense of being white, clever and very ‘aware’ that is somewhat assaulted. It’s an impression of an immense ennui, mixed with a delicate kind of Weltschmerz. All of this, naturally, wrapped in a truly extraordinary tortilla of language. This, for example, is a simple description of road-kill:

Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialog balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive.

And this is a sentence dealing with another visual impression:

It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath.

This is startlingly written, a description that no other writer I know could pull off. In terms of writing, this is not just raw talent, this is true excellency. And it doesn’t stop there. One of the first things we notice, reading the book, is the obsession with names and naming, with the particulars of language. Puns are employed not just with relish and zest, but with a slow deliberation. The names of places are dismembered, interrogated, mirrored, twirled around. But it soon becomes clear that there’s no real thinking attached to these snippets of ideas. It doesn’t ever go beyond the clear interest and fascination in language as tool, element and object. But even if this aspect disappoints, it’s still fair to say that the book crawls with perfect and surprising images and descriptions. And since Tassie is the narrator, these are her excellent descriptions. The very title of the book is taken from one of her “waltzy ballads”. The whole of A Gate at the Stairs is basically a paean to Tassie Keltjin.

The novel is largely set in the “university town of Troy”, where Tassie is thrust into “a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends”´. Tassie isn’t used to that, coming as she does from a farm. Her father is not your typical farmer, he raises and sells potatoes not for the mass market but for connoisseurs. In this past, Moore creates a contrast between Tassie’s peasant upbringing and life in the big city, without having to commit to the complexities that a truly simple home and a sophisticated education may create. Her father is better than other peasants, we are made aware of that, not just once, but time and time again. That’s why the fact that she despises the poor language skills “[b]ack in Dellacrosse”, for example, doesn’t lead to complicated tensions in the book. Instead, her education serves as a pulpit from which she pronounces her superior verdicts, as in this bit about their use of language.

Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said “on” accident instead of “by”. They said “I’m bored of that” or “Wanna come with?” They pronounced “milk” to rhyme with “elk” and “milieu” as “miloo”, as in skip to my loo – when they said it at all. And they used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in “I’d been gonna do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past […].

There’s a smirk hidden in these pronouncements and the final, happy coinage. The impression we have of her is that of a self-satisfied minor writer, critic or editor, with a narrow knowledge of grammar and linguistics, who nonetheless feels empowered to correct other people’s use of grammar. We all know these nitwits, and we all know that actual grammars and dictionaries mostly contradict their pompous judgments of what is ‘bad’ or ‘incorrect’ language, but we also know that they themselves tend to be incorrigible, huffy, self-righteous. That’s because their positions, while mostly shunned by actual linguists, are supported by a broad alliance of creative writing lecturers, English composition teachers with an ax to grind, or literary critics, tenured at universities led by their accountants logic. With the academic stamp of approval, these philistines stampede through our literary lives, dumping their nuggets of wisdom left and right. And here is the exact reason why this is relevant to A Gate at the Stairs, because Tassie, too, is empowered by college education. We the readers don’t know her outside of that intellectual frame. Empowered by the networks of knowledge and power, she doesn’t hesitate to lord it over those less privileged.

The failure of Moore to extract something meaningful from the raw material she’s amassed is even more stunning when we compare A Gate at the Stairs to two other American novels, Lisa Alther’s 1976 Kinflicks, and more to the point, John Williams’ extraordinary novel Stoner, published in 1965, and reprinted by the great NYRB imprint in 2006. The comparison to Kinflicks highlights the excess of satire that is inherent in this kind of set-up. Kinflicks, to this day Lisa Alther’s best novel, is like an incessant flood of satiric laughter that pools around more serious issues of the time depicted. It’s sobering to see how little humor runs through Moore’s book, and how it’s a dried up cleverness that plays not for laughter but for applause. There is undoubtedly a certain delight to be wrenched from A Gate of the Stairs, but it’s a harsh delight, a joy at watching mere technical prowess. The generousness that accompanies true laughter is completely absent from Moore’s mirthless pages. The contrast to Stoner is a different one. Stoner is the novel of a man, the eponymous Stoner, born into rural poverty, who decides to go to university and starts pursuing an academic career. In Stoner we find a convincing depiction of the contrast between poverty and ‘proper education’. Stoner’s very identity is on the line in all this, and the result of his own journey to adulthood is a troubled, conflicted personality. There is no self-satisfaction in the character of Stoner, who is genuinely attracted by knowledge, who is on a constant quest to do right by his ideals which are a mix of his parents’ ideals and his own, hard won ones. Stoner is a memorable novel, an insightful, well written affair that is so convincing one might call it necessary. A necessary work, serious about its subject, which is everything that A Gate at the Stairs is not. The utter obliviousness to the darkness, to the problematics of entitlement, that Lorrie Moore displays is frightful, and, I can’t help but emphasize it: surprising. Such a well-written book, the language of which easily surpasses both Stoner and Kinflicks, and yet such a blind, witless and annoying read.

The plot starts with Tassie Keltjin needing a job in order to support herself, and she finds an opening as a babysitter for a wealthy couple. The husband is a scientist, and the wife runs a gourmet restaurant, and when they hire Tassie, they don’t even have a child to be baby sat yet. In a series of scurrilous encounters and intriguing vignettes, the couple, with the help of Tassie, tries to adopt a black baby, which quest finally succeeds. But this success sets in motion a cavalcade of events that will ultimately shake the worlds of each one involved. Not the worlds of Lorrie Moore or the intellectual house that Tassie Keltjin built, though. Here, everything is in place, although, as I mentioned, the commitments are a bit off, and the thinking hazy and muddled. The couple serves as a representation of the arrogant NY elite. They are rich, they are Atheists and they are do-gooders, filled to the brim with ideas about the perniciousness of racism. Regularly, they meet with other parents of adopted black children, and fill the room with phrases that Tassie is quick to recognize as empty and vapid, about diversity and dichotomies, yadda yadda. But the funny thing is that the talk, while consisting less of thinking and more of fashionable talking points, is not wrong. The content is not inherently ridiculous, but the book takes great pains to make it seem so, by means of exaggerations, by caricature and by branding some that take part in this discussion as hypocrites. Attacking a speaker’s moral fiber doesn’t invalidate his points, but Lorrie Moore, I take it, disagrees. I think that this attitude is one that has also led to the broad renunciation of ‘political correctness’. Reactionary linguists such as Steven Pinker, and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have perfected this rhetoric, which banks on the idea that people are what they are and no amount of perfumed language will change that. Pointing out that white, able-bodied males such as themselves are the main beneficiaries of political incorrectness may be petty.

However, while the basic ideas, sketched straw men rather than elaborated, are not ridiculous, the form context and the setting are indeed problematic. There is, indeed, a hypocrisy in the whole set piece, and its is the fact that Moore shows us privileged people indulging in acts of appropriation, of bodies, minds, and cultures. We know that writing can be used for oppression, and speech can be used (and mostly is) to govern the speechless. This insight, however, is beyond Tassie, and her depiction of a Muslim boyfriend she momentarily acquires, proves to be just the same kind of defining, dominating, governing speech. The depiction I mentioned is that an odd, almost unexplainable one, that of a young man, a fellow student with a darker skin, who turns out to be not just a Muslim, but a fellow traveler of terrorists. This book is set shortly after 9/11, in a time when suspicions towards Muslims and Arabs were rising steadily, and in Moore’s book there is only one man of Arab descent, and he’s both a Muslim and a sympathizer with the goals and means of terrorists.

This episode is the nadir of the whole sorry book. Nothing in Moore’s novel really coheres, which reads like a hastily edited manuscript created by pasting in small snippets of fictional ideas, but this last episode is mind-bogglingly nonsensical, unconnected to the larger whole of the novel and ridiculous in almost every single way. It caps a novel that is so complacent and self-absorbed as to be completely irrelevant. Its handling of characters is largely incompetent, so much so, indeed, that you need to stop following characters and plot and just take things as they come. But, as I said earlier, even if we allow for the fact that this is not a realistic novel but a novel, so to say, of ideas, the outcome is less than satisfying. Both ideas and narrative possibilities are tossed into the air either to be forgotten or to be tied off untidily at the end. It gets so bad that at one point I thought maybe the book was a satire, satirizing Tassie Keltjin, her point of view and those who share her point of view, but even this, ultimately, didn’t pan out, because the book wraps up in one great conciliatory movement. It situates the book firmly among other coming of age tales, and confirms the book’s utter mediocrity. A Gate at the Stairs is one severe disappointment, a gaudy empty box that smells a bit funny. Do not read this book.

Teacher Man: John Williams’ “Stoner”

Williams, John (2003), Stoner, New York Review Books
ISBN 1-59017-199-3

Published in 1965, this is a classical novel about academic life that has been out of print for a while now and, like many other worthy yet recently neglected books, has been reprinted by the New York Review of Books. And so it made its way onto my shelves and yesterday in a train to East Germany I read it and it’s one of the best books I read this year. John Williams’ slim body of work contains 4 novels, among them a Western (Butcher’s Crossing), a historical novel (Augustus) and this one, the life story of a man from the Midwest who comes from hardscrabble circumstances, enters university in 1910 and finally becomes teacher at the University of Missouri, specializing in Latin, Greek and Middle English. It starts in his youth and ends with his death and between these it describes a remarkable life in a way that never fails to move.

Williams’ language is not dazzling, he is not a great stylist, but he’s a good one and that’s quite enough. His , style is never just perfunctory, it leads us straight into the heart of the story and into Stoner’s, by being always clear yet not cold. Williams is always warm, so much so, indeed, that at times he toes the line between warmth and cliché, indeed, between warmth and schlock, without ever descending into the latter. Williams never bores the reader and, at times, moves him to tears. Stoner is a beautiful novel, sad yet not depressing. A light melancholy, a constant sense of defeat drifts through the novel, but it’s not devastating defeat, it’s more like the usual brand cultural pessimism, particularly common in the academe. We have all heard this before, often connected to the advent of the different kinds of structuralism and postmodernism. Why can’t we just analyze or read the text. Soon we’ll be at a point where the pessimists will co-opt the hilarious and well-known line of criticism Empson had to confront upon the publication of the “7 Types of Ambiguity”.

I digress. Back to the novel. “Stoner”’s plot is simple enough. It concerns a young boy from a poor family which cannot afford even farm hands so he is used to hard farm work and is reluctant to leave the farm when his father offers him the prospect of attending the new agricultural college at the University of Missouri. Finally, he leaves, but university is a surprise and propels his life in a direction he could not have expected. Attending an introductory course on English literature he falls in love with books. Soon he drops all his scientific and agricultural courses and reads literature and philosophy. He becomes a bookish person in the best sense of the word: someone with a passion for books and a brain to make that passion work. He learns Greek and Latin and writes his M.A. thesis on prosody in a story in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. While learning and writing he is offered the opportunity to teach undergraduates as acting instructor.

While it’s true that Stoner is a born scholar and a passionate reader, his true vocation, we soon learn, is teaching. In a scene at the end of the book, when he’s honored at a banquet and is asked to give a speech he is speechless and overwhelmed and the only thing he manages to say, from the depth of his heart, is

“I have taught at this university for nearly 40 years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught I might have-“ He paused, as if distracted. Then he said, with a finality, “I want to thank you all for letting me teach.”

Stoner is a dedicated and gifted teacher. As the opening of the novel makes clear, this is no reason for him to be respected by his peers. His colleagues held him “in no great esteem while he was alive” and they “speak of him rarely now”. Stoner did not bend to the fashions of his time, he tried to teach what he thought right which, for a brief period, makes him a very popular professor yet puts him at odds with the heads of the university and the department and cripples his academic career.

Sad though this might be, Stoner is among the least vain characters in fiction I have ever encountered. He does not particularly care about these things, preventing them in effect from becoming personal defeats or tragedies. His personal tragedies concern his life as a man. Soon after obtaining his M.A., while studying towards a doctoral degree, he falls in love with a peculiar and beautiful girl, well-off, from St. Louis. After a brief period of courting her, she consents to marry him, and from then on his private life is ruined, because the woman is profoundly disturbed. Incapable of love, neither emotional nor sexual, she is passionate only for a few months when she decides to become pregnant. In the first half of the novel she appears for me to be the vastly more interesting character. Stoner is bland, the novel lets his love for books, language and knowledge characterize him, he *is* his teaching. His wife, though, is fascinating. From the first time we meet her she is aloof, detached, yet she manages to hold on to Stoner almost as if in an afterthought. She is such an introverted character that we can safely assume her extroverted behavior in the latter half of the novel as a show put on as part of her piecemeal war with Stoner.

Their daughter, Grace, is severely damaged by her mother’s attempts to hurt her father. She punishes the girl, forces her to stop spending time with her father, dress “girly” in order to become “popular” which then meant the same it means today. Until her daughter manages to break free with a truly desperate act, she appears to be the spit image of her mother, damaged in the exact same way. The women are a never ending source of fascination, they are the most ‘three-dimensional’, the most vivid, most mysterious characters in the novel, although they are rather treated in an offhand fashion. There is a young instructor who’s madly in love with Stoner and begins a short but doomed affair with him, who at times seems to be a Randian heroine and at others glitters with something more. It’s a testament to William’s enormous gifts as a writer that his female characters, hidden in the shadows as they often are, are such a success. The few blacks stand out, although in a different way, they are marked: it’s the “Negro farm hand” and the “Negro servant” and the like.

Again, Williams’ novel is too brilliant not to make a few good points on these matters as well. When Stoner at the beginning arrives at the university, he does so practically in blackface, with dirt caked onto his face (remember Bergson?) and when he visits his parents in the summer he finds they have had to hire a “Negro farm hand” to replace him. There are innumerable complexities to this novel, such as his concept of how bodies work. Again, ideologically, the novel’s on the shadowy, mens sana in corpore sana, side of things, with all of Stoner’s male adversaries being either fat or “cripples” or limping. As with the women and the blacks, this simple account hides complexities, too intricate to discuss here. Suffice it to say it’s never as easy as all that with Williams: he’s too good a writer for that. The novel is accessible and appears simple (not simplistic), yet on closer reading it unfolds and turns out to contain deposits of deliciousness, none of which weighs this enjoyable read down. It was moving, thoughtful, and Stoner’s love for books was the best description of an amorous relationship I have had the honor of reading in months. I will most certainly read his other novels. If they are as good as Stoner, I am in for a treat.

I’ll have to add, as a tiny postscript, that the novel appeared less sad to me than it may to others. The life of Stoner, who spends all his life teaching at university, had a utopian ring to my ears. As I contemplate my academic future gliding slowly away, this novel’s proceedings had a melancholy air to me, like reading of a dying civilization. Ah, well.