Deirdre Keating read and liked Michael's review of A Gate at the Stairs:

"I've read all of Lorrie Moore's previous books, and I read them some time ago. And so when I got my hands on this, I was excited: it's been fifteen years since her last novel, a decade since her last story collection.

Which made its sudden...more I've read all of Lorrie Moore's previous books, and I read them some time ago. And so when I got my hands on this, I was excited: it's been fifteen years since her last novel, a decade since her last story collection.

Which made its sudden familiarity something between comforting and disconcerting. Because this is, utterly and unmistakably, a Lorrie Moore novel. It is, like her previous novel, a story of a girl's remembered adolescence, narrated by the now-older woman. There are wisecracks. Everyone wisecracks! Wordplay is constant, and often funny. Little italicized phrases come bubbling up to frame and interrupt the narrative, interjecting themselves wryly in front of events. Not that I'm complaining, or at least not entirely: Moore is an incredible writer on the sentence level, and her descriptions, metaphors, and turns of phrase are as astounding as ever. Still, the sameyness to her previous works is sometimes hard to ignore: the ending, for example, is pretty immediately reminiscent of the end of her most famous short story, "People Like That Are The Only People Here."

Here's what's different with this novel: the brutality, the bleakness. Of course, Moore has never been a happy writer. Anagrams, her first novel, is about loneliness. ("Life is sad. Here is someone." is its refrain, except -- oops! -- turns out there's no one.) Frog Hospital, her second, is an elegy for girlhood, a story of a fall from innocence. Which A Gate at the Stairs is too, sort of, except the protagonist, Tassie, was never really happy in the first place, and when she does experience the joys of innocence, the narrator undercuts it relentlessly, prevents us from enjoying the moment. When Tassie gets a boy, for example: she discovers sex, she is besotted, she is rapturous. But we get this only secondhand, tarnished. This is the sentence where we find out they've had sex: "What was a simple natural masculine compulsion to be in, to tunnel and thrust, I saw as a tender desire to be sweetly engulfed and at least momentarily overpowered by another's devoted attentions." Ha-ha, she was wrong!

And if the style of narration is bleak, the plot is bleaker, and weirder too. When the Boy in Question leaves -- what, this is a Lorrie Moore novel, you knew it'd happen -- it is via a plot twist as brutal as it is utterly bananas. Throughout, there's unresolved menace: what's that car driving by for? Who keeps calling? Beneath the jokey surface of the prose lies a desperate unease. This is Moore's preoccupation in all her writing: the joke as last-ditch effort to accept the unacceptable. But here the world makes certain, at every turn, to assert its unacceptability. During the year this novel narrates, nobody Tassie meets is who they seem, and everybody leaves. Things are not okay.

At the end, battered, Tassie finds a sort of sleepwalking, appalled stoicism -- "life was unbearable, and yet everywhere it was borne" -- that is the closest the novel gets to happiness, and several late passages -- lyrical descriptions of nature paired with stunned acceptances of horror -- are quite gorgeous. If I seem like I'm criticizing Moore for not writing me a light, happy romp, well, that's not quite it. (I'm not entirely sure if, or what, I'm criticizing, to tell the truth; I got this book a few days ago and just now finished it, so have yet to let it linger.) It's just that the immediate effect of this book -- this often-beautiful book -- is that of a blow, and a bit of a gratuitous blow, insufficiently leavened by richness. "Tragedies," Moore writes in one of the little reflective set pieces she's so good at, "were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. ... Jokes were needed. ... And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least." Moore writes tragedies, and nowhere more so than with this novel. They have plenty of jokes, and good ones. But after a certain point, a world confined to those two poles -- the ugly and the ha-ha -- itself feels like a luxury: not sorrow as truth but sorrow as easy reflex, as simulacrum of depth.

Goddamn, though, are her sentences good.(less) "