Master of the short story ranges wide, triumphs in the long form

By Lorrie Moore

Alfred A. Knopf.

336 pp. $26.

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

Fans of Lorrie Moore, and we are legion, have devoured her writing since she first blazed into print with the 1983 short-story collection

Self-Help

. Here was a voice distinct, dazzling, and assured, capable of wry wit one moment and ineffable sadness the next, often within a single paragraph. Moore was all of 26.

Her story "People Like That Are the Only People Here," first published in the New Yorker in 1997 and winner of the O. Henry Prize, is a fierce, heart-wrenching chronicle of a mother of a 1-year-old patient in a pediatric oncology ward, the here where nobody wants to be. One of the most remarkable short works published in recent decades, it's unforgettable and great.

Where Moore has enjoyed somewhat less success is with her novels, which tend to flit, her protean talent seemingly too focused to cascade over so many pages. A Gate at the Stairs is Moore's third novel, her first in 15 years, and a spectacular rebuttal to such notions.

Moore surprises in this novel, set months after 9/11 in the Midwestern academic town of Troy, depicted seemingly as both a love letter to and a send-up of Madison, where Moore is a University of Wisconsin professor. Heroine and story seem initially modest in ambition, yet Moore tackles and often fillets such contemporary subjects as race and class; social warfare over food; working mothers and caregivers; the politics of parenting; and the labeling of good mothers and bad.

Tassie Keltjin is Gate's first-person narrator and, like most Moore protagonists, a verbally clever yet socially at-odds observer tending toward passivity. She's an outsider, a half-Jewish modern farm girl. That is, her father raises heirloom potatoes while her mother seems astounded to be living among the goats.

A 20-year-old student at the university, Tassie lands a job babysitting for Sarah Brink and her largely absent husband, Edward; the couple are waiting for an adoption to be finalized. Sarah is a professional chef at the best restaurant in town ("every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock"), the author of more opinions than actions, and a disaster waiting to ignite, proclaiming, "I always do the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing."

So it seems a gift when her newly adopted, partially black, almost 2-year-old daughter Mary-Emma is immediately handed over to Tassie's care. The girl's name alone suggests the weight of cultural confusion shouldered by the toddler: Mary the Catholic birth mother's choice, Emma the literary pedigree chosen by agnostic, snobbish Sarah, who immediately launches a heated, combative, and accidentally comic discussion group on racial identity. On those evenings Tassie minds the happy children, observing that "In our sequestered nursery behind and above the baby gate at the stairs, there was scarcely an argument." But from her vantage point she can hear the wine-soaked parents drowning in the battle of their misguided intentions: " 'Postracial is a white idea.' This again. It had all begun to sound to me like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat."

Tassie parrots the inane comments of their parents: "I turned toward my charges and said as if in mimicry: 'Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to present It's Time to Shut UP! starring me.' "

Yet, in the "Athens of the Midwest," Tassie can be equally obtuse, believing every lie her "Brazilian" swain tells her, although the native language he professes to speak, and poorly, is Spanish. Here in the heartland, in the comfort of the interior, the war strikes, terrorism resonates. People try to fit in, of mixed religion, race, intention, until they don't. Tassie is surrounded by people who appear to be one thing and claim to be another while sometimes shouldering ghastly secrets and acres of shame.

Moore is given to wordplay. She can create sly aperçus, then deliver bursts of stunning lyricism, such as this description of a fireworks show after 9/11:

"Once the sun set completely, its murky rose stretched taffylike across the horizon, and the air grew cooler, the show began. Like the operation of a rocket ship, the fireworks were staged to burst at designated points across the sky. Peonies and chrysanthemums bloomed forth from spasms and explosions. Were we having fun? Dripping sparkle sizzled and dissipated, then resumed; the deathly silence before each burst began to fill me with dread. Screeches, whistles, booms: The barium green and copper blue held too many intimations of war. We were a glum trio, my parents and I, our necks nonetheless arced and our heads dropped back onto the flattened hoods of our sweatshirts, watching all this lit-up drizzle."

Gate is a gift.