Word: tassieã
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...other characters in “A Gate at the Stairs” initially seem flat—they are colorful, but the reader is never given enough information to theorize about their motives. An epiphany concerning Tassie??s employers near the end of the novel explains some of their actions, but it ultimately reveals more contradictions than solutions to the mystery of their behavior. In the hands of a writer less observant of human nature, the enigmatic behavior of the supporting characters would rob the novel of its internal consistency. But Tassie??s observations...
...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...
...doing something important, unprecedented and unbearably hard,” Sarah says in 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...
Although Moore’s tone is usually straightforward and conversational, she is at heart a writer deeply concerned with language, and many of Tassie??s insights about life in Troy are born from observations about local idiom. When a character drops the word “hogwash,” Tassie deadpans, “I had 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...
...heartlander, a sort of cornfed mystic who bemusedly observes her employers’ frantic railing against racism, fate, and Karl Rove. Her dialogue is laconic, but her inner monologue is full of surprisingly acute observations. Moore gives Tassie an interest in the unsavory and a preoccupation with Sufism, extending Tassie??s savant-like eccentricities to ridiculous levels. Just when her confusion at the hypocrisies of people around her begins to cross the line between clever and insufferable, she’ll use her roommate’s vibrator to stir a glass of chocolate milk, or write...
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