Post Grad Book #5

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Finished: January 6, 2011
Page Count: 322
Why I read it:  
It was on the "Buy 2 Get One Free" table at Barnes and Noble and I was intrigued by the blurb on the back.


Publisher's Weekly review:
Moore (Anagrams) knits together the shadow of 9/11 and a young girl's bumpy coming-of-age in this luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel—the author's first in 15 years. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in the Athens of the Midwest, is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent adventures in prospective motherhood involve a pregnant girl with scarcely a tooth in her head and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend—both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less naïve Tassie. In a parallel tale, Tassie lands a lover, enigmatic Reynaldo, who tries to keep certain parts of his life a secret from Tassie. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy, while generous flashes of wit—Tassie the sexual innocent using her roommate's vibrator to stir her chocolate milk—endow this stellar novel with great heart.


What I thought:
It was good but I didn't love it.  Moore was praised for her use of descriptions.  A quote on the front of my copy from The Washington Post Book World states "Profound... get ready to expand your sense of what Moore- and a novel- can do."  Yes, the descriptions and the scene she set through the entire book was impressive but for me, it was too much.  The story was okay but I really feel like not much happened by the time the book was over.  It's supposedly a "coming of age story for a girl in college post 9/11" and that's what I was originally intrigued by but I didn't see it.  Maybe it was because I was bored by the excessive amounts of descriptions, metaphors and paragraphs of nothing I found terribly interesting.  I like my stories to be simple, involve some intrigue or mystery and a lot of dialogue.  This was the opposite and therefore, not my favorite.  Still, I made it a point to finish the book (mostly to see if it ever got better- it did not).