Word: novelness
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Where Nick is a detached observer in the novel, Shepherd’s narrator is the centerpiece of the production. Although Shepherd has the novel memorized, his intentionally stilted delivery—as if he really is reading “Gatsby” out loud for the first time—never betrays this feat until the end of the second half, in which he goes off-book for nearly an hour...
...imagination that I set the most high.” Lorrie Moore admires Welty and, on a vacation to Jackson, Mississippi took a photo of Welty’s house for her scrapbook. She appears to have retained Welty’s words as well. In her newest novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” Moore enters completely into the mind, heart and skin of a dynamic and perceptive college student, and in doing so, has created an incisive portrait of life in America immediately after September 11th...
...Gate at the Stairs” chronicles a year in the life of Tassie Keltjin, the 20-year-old daughter of a potato farmer who has left her hometown of Dellacrosse, Illinois, to attend college in Troy, a nearby university town. The novel starts in 2001, a few months after September 11, and focuses loosely on Tassie’s experiences working as a nanny to Sarah and Edward, a pair of well-meaning, well-to-do liberals who take a sanctimonious and labored approach to parenting their adopted mixed-race toddler...
...reference to raising a biracial child in a prejudiced community, with a superciliousness that makes for a typical target of Tassie’s witty internal monologue. Tassie’s tone careens between ribald and elegiac, making “A Gate at the Stairs” a novel to read with caution. Tassie’s familiar voice can distract from Moore’s understated style and her love of detail and word games...
...once seen a hog washed. In whey. The hog was Helen, and she really liked it, the slop of the whey, then later a cool hose.” Her constant language-play calls attention to the separate vernaculars of Troy and Dellacrosse. As a result, the novel establishes an unusual and rather negative role for language—that of a barrier in the way of communication...