The Good Stuff: A Gate at the Stairs

Literary fiction - everybody thinks they know what it means but no one has a decent definition. Rather, we describe it by what it's not.

It's not popular. It's never on the best seller list. James Patterson, Danielle Steel and Dan Brown don't write it. High school students groan when they're assigned it. It doesn't have a plot. It never ends happily. It ain't mystery, sci-fi or romance. There are too many words and absolutely no pictures.

Sound horrible? Many are, even though they win Pulitzers and National Book awards like moths to light. So what good are they except to make yourself sound smart at cocktail parties? Why bother?

I'll tell you why to bother: Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs. I can't stop thinking about it and I want everyone I love to read it. Why do I feel so strongly? I have no idea.

And thus we come to my own personal definition of literary fiction: a novel with characters so vivid that you feel you either know these people or are these people, which uses language instead of plot to do the heavy-lifting of conveying meaning and which, in answer to the question, "what's that book about?", the reply is always "life".

Lorrie Moore has written about life in the shape of college student Tassie Keltjin. Tassie was raised on a small farm and is now enrolled in a big liberal state college (think Madison or Ann Arbor). What Tassie lacks in experience, she makes up for in intelligence, humor and keen powers of observation - great qualities for a character-narrator. Tassie faithfully describes college life from the inanity of some of her classes, to the loneliness when her roommate "Murph" ditches her for a boyfriend, to the excitement when Tassie herself first falls in love.

But there's that lack of experience thing again. Tassie confuses sex with love. Her boyfriend Reynaldo does not. When he leaves college suddenly, Tassie is devastated. She has neither Murph nor her family back home to comfort her.

But the real education results from Tassie's job. She becomes a nanny for a newly-adopted baby, and the adoptive parens Sarah and Edward Thornwood-Brink become Tassies "life teachers" in a manner of speaking.

Sarah explains that she is unable to have children, and now in her forties, she and Edward have decided to adopt as a last chance. She takes Tassie to meet various birth mothers, all Tassie's age, all in trouble. One of the girls chooses Sarah and Edward as suitable parents for her two year old baby Mary, whom Sarah immediately renames the tonier "Emma".

Even when Emma comes home and the family settles into its new routine, Tassie can not forget the birth mothers she met. Will they be alright? Will they always miss their babies? She googles Emma's birth mother and sees the same name in an obituary.

But the authentically sad characters in this book are the adults. Like most young people, Tassie implicitly looks to the grown-ups for answers but the grown-ups don't seem to know any more than the college kids. Sarah deludes herself into believing that she can run her successful restaurant and be a successful mother. She can't. Edward deludes himself into thinking he wants to be a father. He flirts with Tassie instead. Tassie's own father drinks and her mother is a minor mess.

Which begs the question, what exactly do we expect kids to learn when they go away to college? Tassie studies Sufism and wine-tasting. Is that enough? Or do we want to offer them a safe 4-year introduction to adulthood? Just enough time to insure safe transit to "the real world." If that's the case, college surely didn't help any of the adults in this novel. Tassie draws her own conclusion: there's no such thing as wisdom but there is definitly lack of wisdom.

The beauty of this book is not the story: it's Lorrie Moore's telling of the story. It's rich in figurative language (the autumn moon is a "tangerine shard - an orange peel stuck up there like the lunch garbage of God") and void of cliche. Moore never tells us what to think. She just shows us Tassie observing the world, interacting with the world and let's the reader draw his own conclusion.

A Gate at the Stairs is a thoughtful and loving examination of the rigors of college. Not the rigors of classes. Rather, the rigors of first discovering that life does not come with operating instructions.

Fall Fiction: My Most Wanted List

A few weeks ago, my supervisor and I were looking at a list of major authors with books coming out in the next few months: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Ha Jin and Anne Tyler are just a few. It's an exciting season for fiction lovers. The only difficulty is selecting the titles you most want to read! Here are three books at the top of my to-read list.

Lorrie Moore, best known for short story collections like Anagrams and Birds of America, has a new novel out, A Gate at the Stairs. Set in a midwestern college town in the aftermath of 9/11, the narrator is Tassie, an intelligent but naive twenty-year-old college student and former country girl who works as a nanny for a wealthy restauranteur who wants to adopt a baby. According to Publishers Weekly: "The story's apparent modesty and ambling pace are deceptive, a cover for profound reflections on marriage and parenthood, racism and terrorism, and especially the baffling, hilarious, brutal initiation to adult life -- what all of us learn to endure 'in the dry terror of cluelessness.'"

If all that sounds too heavy, let me add that Moore is one of funniest writers around: I've wanted to read more of her ever since reading "You're Ugly, Too," which John Updike selected for the The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology. (The story opens: "You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline 'NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN.' They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute for a movie.")

I've never read anything by Chicago writer Sara Paretsky, but two trusted readers have been raving so fervently about her Chicago mysteries, which often address social issues and injustice, that I've decided to dive into her latest novel, Hardball. Hardball is the 13th novel to feature kick-ass private investigator V. I. Warshawski (née Victoria), who in this novel is asked to locate a man who has been missing for over 40 years, and in the process "confronts an ugly period in Chicago's history, [including] a peaceful march in 1966 by Martin Luther King that resulted in a white riot and the murder of a young black woman" (Publishers Weekly). If you're someone who likes to start with the first book in a series, Paretsky's first V.I. Warshawski novel is Indemnity Only.

I previously posted about my desire to read something by Pete Dexter after his hilarious appearance on Book TV. Well, his new novel, Spooner, has just hit the shelves, and the first few pages indicate it was worth the wait. Characterized by Publishers Weekly as "calamitously funny and riotously tragic," its hero is Spooner, whose life begins inauspiciously in 1956: his mother "issues Spooner, feet first and the color of an eggplant, an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, like a bare little man dropped through a gallows on the way to the next world." The life of Spooner, "who tends toward a life of criminal mischief" (Publishers Weekly), is contrasted with that of his stepfather, a high school principal.

Some other fall titles are The Humbling by Philip Roth, A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve, and Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by the late William Styron. (Remember, you can place any book on hold as soon as it appears in our online catalog. To place a hold on a book mentioned in this blog, just click on the appropriate link. If the catalog indicates that a book is showing on shelf, give us a call and we will set it aside for you.)

What fall books are you most looking forward to?