“Mo was tired of the bellicose, lachrymose religion the attack had birthed, was sickened by the fundamentalists who defended it by declaring the day sacred, the place sacred, the victims sacred, the feelings of their survivors sacred – so much sacredness, no limit to the profanity justified to preserve it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 25, 2011)

Ten years have gone by since the Twin Towers came down on 9/11, and through those years, a wide array of talented fiction writers have attempted to make sense of that pivotal experience: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, John Updike, Jonathan Safran Foer, Claire Messud, to name just a few.

The brilliance of Amy Waldman’s book is that she does not try to apply logic to why 9/11 occurred, nor does she attempt to recreate the complex and traumatic emotions that most Americans felt that day. Instead, she explores something broader: the fallout of a country confused, divided, and sick with fear, clamoring to make sense of the insensible.

The book begins with an ambiguous title: The Submission. On a concrete level, the submission refers to anonymous submissions by architects – in the best democratic tradition – who vie for the right to build an enduring memorial to Ground Zero. But read those words again, and the meaning is far deeper. Is Waldman referring to the submission of Muslims to Qur’an law, forcing them into outsider positions? Or is she writing of the submission of too many Americans to their deepest fears?

A bit of all three interpretations exist, but it becomes increasingly evident that it is the latter that Amy Waldman is most interested in. The skeleton of the story is this: the winner of the submission is an American Muslim, Mohammad Khan, whose true religion is his vaulting ambition. (At a later point, Mo’s lover will say to him, “Now I see that it was about you: your design, your reputation, your place in history.”) Raised in the United States since birth, Mo (as he is universally called) has barely set foot in a mosque his entire life. His design – a garden – is comforting and soothing, particularly to the sole member of the selection jury who is also the widow of a 9/11 victim.

Once Mo’s identity is leaked as the winner, the fervor begins. He is called, among other things, “decadent, abstinent, deviant, violent, insolent, abhorrent, aberrant, and typical.” Amy Waldman, the former bureau chief of the New York Times, knows this territory intimately: the ambitious reporter who will do anything for a scoop (including defecting to the New York Post, which traffics in sensationalism), the equally ambitious governor who strives for reelection while inflaming public sentiment, the radio talk show host who plays into his audience’s prejudices. Before too long, the garden is being depicted as an “Islamic victory garden,” Mo is being called by his full name, and his loyalty to the U.S. is being questioned on all fronts.

Amy Waldman characters are nearly always fully realized: whether she’s writing about Mo, Claire – the wealthy widow and key juror on the selection committee – or a seemingly bit player who is propelled to center stage, the Bangladeshi widow Asma, whose husband, an illegal immigrant, worked as a janitor and was killed in the attack.

Although the author’s point of view is not hard to discern, to her credit, she reveals all sides and that is never clearer than during the scene when the public weighs in about the design. The question becomes: “What history do you want to write with this memorial?” Every side is represented, from the professor of Middle Eastern studies who states, “…Achieving that paradise through martyrdom – murder suicide – has become the obsession of Islamic extremists, the ultimate submission to God: to the author on Islamic gardens who asks, “Since when did we become so afraid of learning from other cultures?”

The pretentious artistic debates… the cynical political showboating… the tactical moves of special-interest groups… the media that fuels rumors rather than reports news – all are depicted here. This well-written, thought-provoking, and nuanced book will appeal to many different kinds of readers. With all the posturing, the truth is often found in just letting go. Or, as Mo eventually discovers, “He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 197 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (August 16, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amy Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Terrorist by John Updike Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• The Submission (August 2011)

“If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there’d be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That’s what life is.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 19, 2011)

Lightning People is an electrifying book, a high voltage tightrope of five 30-something characters that are walking the edge in the post 9/11 New York City. It’s a book about true connections, missed connections and downright parasitic connections. Its energy strikes and surges randomly, briefly illuminating, sometimes plunging back into the darkness. And by the end, it leaves the reader rubbing eyes as he or she emerges back into a transformed light.

In crucial ways, its theme is similar to the Oscar-winning movie Crash. One of the key characters in that movie said: “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Move the setting from L.A. to New York. An ensemble of rootless characters crash into each other as they struggle to find meaningful interactions. There is the actor Joseph Giteau, who left his Ohio home and his reclusive and conspiracy-obsessed mother, newly married to Del Kousavos, a snake expert at a city zoo who is on a work visa from Greece. In the aftermath of 9/11, he finds himself at thriving prisonerofearth conspiracy meetings, trying to take stock and make sense of his life.

Joseph and Del are surrounded by others: Raj, Del’s exotic and not-yet-forgotten former lover and his sister Madi, Del’s best friend, an executive at a company outsourcing jobs to India. And lastly, there is William Asternathy, whose career is on permanent hiatus, on “fast live-wire current circulating through the city.”

All of these characters try to remake their fate and their destiny in that shining yet alienated city of re-creation, New York. Del considers: ”The whole city was pulsating with electricity. It had been all of the light that had first attracted her to New York, had brought all of the fresh arrivals beating around the same shine. But what happens when her eyes finally adjusted to the light?” And William thinks, “No one in New York has parents. Or families for that matter. We’re all pretty much immigrants taking shelter here.”

As the action pulsates forward, secrets emerge or remain hidden, and it’s very important for each reader to experience the arc of these secrets individually. Among the questions raised are, “Will a generational health secret derail Joseph and Del’s marriage and end Joseph’s life prematurely? How will William’s dark self-destructive streak affect those around him and what damage will it do? And are the conspiracy theories – deriving from the Latin phrase “breathe together” – a shared paranoia or are they self-fulfilling prophecies?”

As these characters brush against each other – sometimes willingly, sometimes inadvertently – sparks are set off. “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice until it does,” muses Joe. Coincidences are packed into coincidences, but that is the fabric of the novel; how our lives all intersect and how one shocking personal tragedy can alter our paths, individually and collectively.

This is an intricate novel, beautifully plotted, brimming with high-stakes paranoia and calamity and angst, narrated with vigor and flashes of insight. It is difficult to believe this is a debut novel and it certainly goes on my Top Ten list for 2011.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soft Skull Press; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christopher Bollen
EXTRAS:	Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Handbook of Lightning Survivors by Michele Young-Stone The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Bibliography:

• Lightning People (August 2011)

“Above the dry hills the air turned white — that shimmering electric pallor that pretended to promise rain in the desert, and the hard wind swirling up grit from the ground, while Ned climbed trees to nail up speakers behind D—‘s speaking stone, and Crunchy and Creamy stirred up batches of gangster acid, cut with speed, with Tab or Mountain Dew in plastic garbage cans, so that it rained snakes instead of water, and I — I tore my robe to bare one breast and caught such a snake, its diamond back writhing over my hand, meaning to bind it around my brow as a living coronet, wedge head erect and spitting venom while I danced outside the borders of any mortal consciousness, whirling my thyrsus in one hand and a wildcat’s spotted cub in another.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 06, 2011)

I have chosen this rather longer quotation to show how Madison Smartt Bell can turn on a dime between a realistic description of a California druggie cult in the late sixties to an evocation of the revels of Dionysian maenads from the earliest age of Greek mythology. The link here is an acid trip, but Bell does not need chemicals to effect his alchemy. In 2001, when the book opens, the narrator Mae is a middle-aged croupier in a Las Vegas area casino. Bell’s description is realistic and immediate: “Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, and almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning.” But two sentences later, he has already made the shift: “It was a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck.” Writing of the harsh life of the trailer park behind a chain-link fence in the desert, with the tracks of ATVs crossing the serpentine marks of sidewinders in the sand — Cormac McCarthy country — Bell can match the master, image for image. But he is also liable to launch into a passage of Classical Greek (and, what’s more, leave it untranslated)! There are scenes of drugs, sex, mutilation, and murder in this book that would normally turn my stomach, but Bell’s ability to juggle the violence of the American underbelly with the Bacchic celebration of unbridled passion, and to keep both balls scintillating in the air at the same time, made for such an exhilarating experience that I was fascinated throughout. It was even worth the nightmares when I went to bed.

Perhaps it worked for me because I have had a classical education, and have worked with myth all my professional life. I think the intensity of the writing will still come through to those who do not catch the references, but it might still be worth checking the Wikipedia article on Orpheus before starting. Not just his trip to the underworld to reclaim Eurydice, but also the less familiar legends about his death, torn apart by maenads in the throes of a Dionysian orgy. Two important figures in the novel are referred to by their initials only — rather coyly, since the allusion is pretty obvious: O— (Orpheus) is a rock star, living in a beach house in Malibu; D— (Dionysus) is the charismatic leader of a drug cult known as The People. Although this may sound impossibly fantastic, so was a lot else that was going on in the late sixties, not least the murderous Manson Family. Madison Smartt Bell’s miracle is his ability to be simultaneously mythic and utterly realistic.

The novel, broken into 74 very short chapters, begins in 2001. Mae’s reaction to the World Trade Center attack is different from that of most Americans. She compiles the news footage into a two-hour tape that she watches again and again, reveling in it: “The planes bit chunks from the sides of the towers and the gorgeous sheets of orange flame roared up and the mortals flung away from the glittering windows like soap flakes swirling in a snow globe and the tower shuddered, buckled, blossomed and came showering down.” It is clear she has a fascination with violence, and in alternating chapters we discover why. Traumatized by incestuous abuse (worse in that she seems to have embraced rather than resisted it), she leaves home as a teenager and travels to California, “balling for bread” as she puts it. There, she is picked up by D— and recruited into The People, living in their commune outside San Francisco, taking part in activities which become more and more anarchic. When the police raid the compound, Mae manages to escape with her lover Laurel, but the two later separate to go into hiding under false identities. Now, over 30 years later, the memories come flooding back, triggered by a news shot of Laurel fleeing from Ground Zero: “So I saw Laurel for the first time again, Laurel kneeling on the sidewalk, her head thrown back, her hands stretched out with the fingers crooked, as weapons or in praise. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, like in the old days, though not for the same reason.”

These closing words of the opening chapter, which itself is only a page and a half long, deliver a mule kick into a roller-coaster of a ride. It is horrible yet thrilling, sickening yet exhilarating, with a tense pace that never lets up. Other than McCarthy, it makes me think of Robert Stone, who writes an appreciation on the cover, of the violence of Roberto Bolaño, and most recently of Carlos Fuentes, whose Destiny and Desire makes a similar play between myth and reality. But The Color of Night is leaner and meaner than any of these, and more brilliant in its darkness. Undoubtedly one of my best books of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Madison Smartt Bell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Devil’s Dream

Bibliography:

• The Washington Square Ensemble (1983)
• Waiting for the End of the World (1985)
• Straight Cut (Hard Case Crime) (1986)
• The Year of Silence (1987)
• Soldier’s Joy (1989)
• Barking Man and Other Stories (1990)
• Doctor Sleep (1991)
• Save Me, Joe Louis (1993)
• Ten Indians (1996)
• Anything Goes (2002)
• Devil’s Dream (2009)
• The Color of Night (April 2011)

Haitian series:

• All Soul’s Rising (1995) 
• Master of the Crossroads (2000)
• The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004)

Nonfiction:

• Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure (1997)
• Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form (2000)
• Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (2005)
• Toussaint L’Ouverture (2006)
• Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore (2007)

“No more Gus. No more Billy, either, not as they were then. Taken away – – by death, by life, inexorable life. Billy felt tears at the back of her throat, but she didn’t yield to them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (APR 8, 2010)

I have been a fan of Sue Miller since her first novel, The Good Mother. Her newest novel, The Lake Shore Limited, is original and transformative. It is a novel within novels, a story of a play that tells the story of this novel alongside the main narratives of the characters as they unfold.

The novel is told from the vantage points of four characters: Billy, Rafe, Leslie, and Sam. Each of them is connected by at least one degree of separation from each other. Billy is a playwright who has written a play about a terrorist bombing of a railroad. In real life, she has lost her lover, Gus, to the tragedies of 9/11. As we read this book, we are gradually allowed to see how much of her play is truly about her as well as her many personal aspects of self. Like all of us, Billy uses “masks” to protect her privacy. Her work as a playwright gives her additional means and artistic license within which to conceal or expose herself.

Leslie is Gus’ older sister, fourteen years his senior. She holds on to the belief that Gus and Billy would have gotten married had Gus not died. She feels a strong need to take care of Billy and to help her survive her tragic loss. She also wants to help Billy move on in life at the same time that she is afraid that Billy will move on. She, like the other characters, are filled with conflicted and ambivalent emotions, often not clear to themselves and definitely not static.

Rafe is the starring actor in Billy’s play, The Lake Shore Limited. He is married to a woman who has Lou Gehrig’s Disease, also known as ALS. His wife, Lauren, is a complete invalid and has reached the point where her speech is barely understandable and she is unable to walk. Billy decides to seduce Rafe realizing that what might happen could be anything, but it would not be a relationship longer than one night. Rafe is so lonely and despairing that he succumbs to Billy’s advances. His character in the play is a man who fears that his wife may have died in the terrorist attack and is not sure how to feel. His infidelity with Billie brings up a lot of conflicted and guilty emotions for him that he puts to brilliant use in his acting.

Sam is an old friend of Leslie’s, an architect who Leslie invites to a dinner with Billy in order to set them up. Sam is a widower, having lost his wife to breast cancer when his children were young. He is fragile and feels inept in this difficult world. He is distant from his three children and had a failed second marriage. Of all the characters in this novel, Sam is the least developed and his role is not clear.

All of the characters have suffered great and astounding losses, tragedies of the highest order. Their grief has led them to succumb to beliefs about the uncertainty of this world that others may not even think about. Some have developed protective shells that are hard to break. Others are so fragile that their emotional stability seems miraculous. All of Miller’s characters lead rich inner lives, at times often irreconcilable with their outer lives and discordant from what they hope for.

This is a book filled with symbols and metaphors, a book of the depths to which people fall and the heights to which they aspire. It is a book of lightning flashes of ideas and of the people coupled with these ideas. Miller realizes that life makes no promises and that, perhaps, even to wake up in the morning is a miracle of its own.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 85 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Sue Miller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Senator’s Wife

Bibliography:

• The Good Mother (1986)
• Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories (1987)
• Family Pictures (1990)
• For Love (1993)
• The Distinguished Guest (1995)
• While I Was Gone (1999)
• The World Below (2001)
• Lost in the Forest (2005)
• The Senator’s Wife (January 2008)
• The Lake Shore Limited (April 2010)

Nonfiction:

• The Story of My Father (2003)

Movies from books:

• The Good Mother (1988)
• Inventing the Abbotts (1997)

“Why are we here?” he asked a passing soldier.
“You guys are al Qaeda,” the soldier said.
Todd laughed derisively, but Zeitoun was startled. He could not have heard right.

Zeitoun had long feared this day would come. Each of the few times he had been pulled over for a traffic violation, he knew the possibility existed that he would be harassed, misunderstood, suspected of shadowy dealings that might bloom in the imagination of any given police officer.

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 19, 2009)

It’s been four years since one of the country’s deadliest natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina, hit New Orleans, yet the stories of those affected have been making their way out only slowly. Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun is one such. Here too, as in his brilliant What is the What, Eggers does an expert job narrating non-fiction and making the story come alive.

By all indications, the Zeitouns—Kathy and Abdulrahman—were a successful couple in New Orleans. They owned a construction and painting business and had a vibrant family with four girls. Abdulrahman, a Syrian American who had spent a lifetime wandering the seas, settled in New Orleans in 1994 and married Kathy, a convert to Islam.

Years later, when Hurricane Katrina came knocking, true to pattern, Abdulrahman stayed behind figuring he would need to hunker down only for a day or two. “Their business wasn’t a simple one, where you could lock an office door and leave,” Eggers writes explaining why the decision might have been a hard one to make, “Leaving the city meant leaving all their properties, leaving their tenants’ homes and this they couldn’t do unless absolutely necessary.”

But of course, as we know, things got very bad quickly and Abdulrahman finds his house deep in water. He begins to sleep on the roof in a small tent and uses a canoe he once bought, to help stranded neighbors. He takes comfort in providing some measure of help to his fellow citizens and especially to a few dogs that he takes to regularly feeding every day. As the situation gets worse, as the water gets increasingly toxic, as the looting starts, and the law and order situation gets increasingly shaky, Kathy pleads with her husband to leave. Abdulrahman is still adamant—he is of more use here in New Orleans, he insists. What would he really do away from home waiting for word to get back and merely worrying about his property and business?

So stay he does until one day a group of armed government officers show up at his door and Abdulrahman suddenly finds himself under arrest. He is taken to a makeshift prison at the nearby Greyhound station—the charges against him are unknown. At first Zeitoun naively suspects he is taken into custody because he ignored the mandatory evacuation order. Soon it becomes apparent that his ethnicity and his religion might have something to do with his being held without contact, charges, bail or trial.

Having once fished with his brothers in Syria, Zeitoun accurately uses the metaphor “bycatch” to describe his being caught in the government’s war on terror. “It was a fishing term,” Eggers writes, “…when they pulled in the net, there were thousands of sardines, of course, but there were other creatures too, life they had not intended to catch and for which they had no use.”

The book is full of touching details—you can tell Eggers has done his homework. Family pictures flesh out the characters well. While he was held in prison, Abdulrahman’s brother in Spain, Ahmad, writes letters to American authorities, desperate for any information about his brother. These letters—fractured English and all—bring out the plight of the family extremely effectively.

Prison was full of horrors: “The guards alternated between the pepper spray and the beanbag gun, shooting the men and women in the cages,” Eggers writes. Kathy’s plight as she waits for word from her husband and eventually fights for his release, is also detailed well.

Almost as horrifying as Zeitoun’s ordeal are the gross inefficiencies of the response system with its totally absurd set of priorities. For one, “while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and overpasses,” vast amounts of money and energy were being spent on building a complex and efficient prison at the local Greyhound station. Then there were the fan boats which were deployed right after the storm, but which missed calls for help because they were so darned noisy. Months later the Zeitouns have a FEMA trailer deposited on their property for weeks on end—without a set of keys to actually use it. Authorities at local prisons don’t have records of Katrina refugees coming through—“they’re FEMA’s” is the standard reply. Zeitoun chronicles many of these and as such casual asides that they end up making a deeper impact on the reader than any polemic material could.

Kudos go to Dave Eggers who has increasingly used the power of his pen to tell the stories that need to be told. In the incredible What is the What, which I really loved, Eggers chronicled the horrors of war through the eyes of a Sudanese teenage refugee. Here too, Eggers lays bare the heartbreaking story of a man who is subjected to untold horrors simply because of one of the most bizarre confluences of American history and natural disaster. Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Zeitoun is a must-read. It’s heartbreaking to see someone so much in love with his country be betrayed by a justice system gone awry. “In the grand scheme of the country’s blind, grasping fight against threats seen and unseen, there would be mistakes made.” Eggers writes.

“This country was fallible,” Zeitoun sadly realizes. Yes, it is. This sobering realization—that there are hundreds of such “bycatch” in our government’s war on terror—sinks in slowly. It is a realization that is hard to swallow but is also what makes Zeitoun such a riveting read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 492 readers
PUBLISHER:	McSweeney’s (July 15, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	McSweeney’s page on Dave Eggers Wikipedia page on Dave Eggers
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More New Orleans stories: The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elise Blackwell The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros New Orleans Noir edited by Julie Smith Fictional experience of post 9-11 fear: Harbor by Lorraine Adams

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002)
• The Unforbidden is Compulsory; or, Optimism (short stories) (2004)
• How We Are Hungry (short stories) (2004)
• Short Short Stories (2005)
• What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006)
• How the Water Feels to the Fishes (short stories) (2007)
• The Wild Things (2009)
• A Hologram for the King (2012)
• The Circle (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story (2000)
• Zeitoun (2009)

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to take a look at the “post 9/11” books we’ve reviewed at Mostly Fiction…. that is books that seemed to hit at the cultural changes within our country, post 9/11.

So here’s what I have for my first pass — please add your comments on the ones you can think of:

• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner
• Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff (also see author  interview)
• Harbor by Lorraine Adams
• The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• Shalimar the Clown by Salmon Rushdie
• Flight by Ginger Strand
• Terrorist by John Updike
• America’s Report Card by John McNally
• Cranberry Queen by Kathleen DeMarco
• Bannerman’s Ghost by John Maxim
• A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve

Books that speak directly to the day:

• In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman
• The Garden of  Last Days by Andre Dubois III
• What We’ve Lost by Graydon Carter
• 9-11 Commission Report

And just to think about pre-9/11:

• Trudy Hopedale by Jeffrey Frank

“The flat, green world of my parents’ hogless, horseless farm—its dullness, its flies, its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery—twisted away and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends. Someone had turned on the lights…My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone du Beauvoir.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 10, 2009)

Lorrie Moore’s superb novel, A Gate At The Stairs, is told through the voice of 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin. A farmer’s daughter, Tassie attends a liberal arts college and is slowly navigating the daily intricacies of life. “I had come from Dellacrosse Central, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy—“the Athens of the Midwest”—as if from a cave, like the priest-child of a Columbian tribe I’d read of in Anthropology, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his childhood and allowed only stories—no experience—of the outside world,” Tassie recounts.

To support herself while at college, Tassie applies for a job as a babysitter with a local couple: Sarah Brink and Edward Thornwood, who are looking to adopt. The two have moved to the college town from the East—Sarah owns a local restaurant, Petit Moulin, while her husband is a cancer researcher. They end up adopting a biracial African-American child, Mary Emma or “Emmie” as she comes to be called.

Initially unsure about babies and children in general (“I was every hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps,” Tassie admits) she nonetheless develops a deep attachment toward Emmie and often gets mistaken for the toddler’s mother. While at college, she also falls for a mysterious Brazilian named Reynaldo and evenings are often spent walking Emmie in a stroller to Reynaldo’s apartment.

Moore’s writing is simply spectacular and is certainly the star of this wonderful novel—a novel one should add, that fans have breathlessly waited for, for 15 years. Every sentence is made to be savored and the wordplay never gets tiring. Here, for example, is Moore’s description of Sarah’s restaurant, Petit Moulin:

“It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entrée freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, filets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies, restaurants to which students never went, except if newly pinned to a fraternity boy or dating an assistant dean or hosting a visit from their concerned suburban parents.”

A Gate at the Stairs is set in post 9-11 America and it deals with complex issues: racism, balancing career and motherhood, the complexities of adoption, and war effortlessly. Even in “progressive, exemplary” Troy, Emmie is the target of racism—both overt and subtly hinted at. When Tassie brings Emmie to the local playground once, a white woman suggests her daughter have a playdate with Emmie: “My Maddie doesn’t have any African American friends and I think it would be good for her to have one,” she says. “The idea that Mary-Emma would be used like that—to amuse and educate white children, give them an experience, as if she were a hired clown—enraged me,” Tassie recounts.

Moore also wonderfully details Tassie’s life back home in Dellacrosse—a place that is as alien to her as Troy. Her relationships with her brother and parents are done beautifully. “I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long term—no bad plans either, no plans at all—and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school) sometimes shamed me,” Tassie says. It speaks volumes about the town they live in that Tassie’s younger brother, Robert, thinks of her as a mature, street-smart sibling—everything Tassie knows she is not.

About half of the way in, the story accelerates and Moore piles on the revelations. For one thing, boyfriend Reynaldo is not really who he seems to be. Since he is always a tad strange and aloof, this is easy to believe. What are harder to take are the larger deceptions: As it turns out the Thornwood-Brinks are harboring a tragic secret of their own. This “secret”—which ends up affecting Tassie as well—is revealed in such brilliant and vivid detail that it leaves the reader gasping and breathless. Suddenly the entire novel shifts perspective and you begin to see the couple in a new light.

One of Tassie’s favorite descriptors is “quasi.” She is never completely in love with an idea nor completely against it. She is always “quasi.” Moore does an expert job in chronicling this emotional detachment—which is not as much a product of an uncaring personality—as it is of a person who is still trying to find her way around the world. The problem is that harsh life events violently thrust her into an adult world where loss and grief are part of the landscape.

A Gate At the Stairs is a superlative account of one girl’s coming of age. Merely twenty-one, Tassie has already experienced love (of course), loss, deception and that most adult of all emotions—regret.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 268 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lorrie Moore
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Some of our favorite coming of age novels: The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle The Perfect Man by Naeem Murr Eve Green by Susan Fletcher

Bibliography:

• Self Help : Stories (1985)
• Anagrams (1986)
• Birds of America : Stories (1988)
• Like Life: Stories (1990)
• Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)
• A Gate at the Stairs (2009)
• Bark: Stories (February 2014)

Children’s Books:

• The Forgotten Helper (1987)