Lorrie Moore has a way with words. When I met her at a book signing for A Gate at the Stairs in Philadelphia, I commented as she was signing my book that it must get a little boring writing the same thing over and over again. She said, you're just lucky I haven't signed it Morrie Loore, which I've done a few times.

I myself and a lot of the authors that I favor tend to value wordplay and the artistic bastardization and commandeering of language to fit our needs, rather than focus on plot-driven narrative. Hemingway was such a writer. Moore is such a writer. Not granting that Moore herself would vouchsafe this philosophy, her novel could be used as evidence for the prosecution.

The book tells a very dramatic story of an almost flatly affected young college girl dealing with being a flatly affected college girl from a midwestern town who nannies for a white couple that has adopted a biracial ("mixed") baby. Although at times the plot takes very melodramatic turns that spiral into tense horizons, Moore's focus on tangential narratives and brilliant similes work wonders for the reader. She is a natural at wordplay. A sated satirist, I think she would say herself. Dry, humorous, witty, and bucolic. She does a tremendous job mixing sadness and comedy, which has been a benchmark for her literature for years.

The titular metaphor of the Gate at the Stairs shows up endlessly through the narrative, often showing the separation of things: races, adults from children, lovers from lovers, life from non-life (not death), etc. Ultimately, Moore crafts a very poetic and pretty novel about some very not-pretty things, and guides the reader through complication to get to a point of crystal clarity.