As an admirer of Lorrie Moore’s short stories, I’ve long looked forward to the publication of The Gate at the Stairs, her first novel in fourteen years.

Tassie Keltjin, a naïve student at a university in the Midwest, takes a job as a babysitter for a couple in the process of adopting a child.  The time she spends with them and with their little girl, Mary-Emma, gives her a view outside her own restricted upbringing.  She gets glimpses of a sophisticated but dark adult world with complicated relationships and deep sorrows.  She also becomes increasingly aware of a new, bewildering America—one born on 9/11, a country now full of suspicion, racial profiling, and preparations for war.

There is much about this book to love:  Moore is verbally dexterous, capable of spinning vivid passages that are comedic and poignant at once, scenes–in Moore’s own words–full of “idle spirals and desperate verbal coils”.  As a whole, however, the work flounders.  Innovations that are fresh and effective in a short story, when stretched to fit the dimensions of a novel, begin to feel gimmicky.  This is off-putting, drawing the reader out of the story to puzzle over technique.

Then, it’s never clear what the story is about.  Even Moore seems confused.  The opening mother-daughter thread quickly frays.  The theme of immanent war flashes, replaced quickly by a succession of others: insolvable race-relations, implacable jihad, the complexities of a rotten marriage.  Tangled asides on food, flowers, music, politics, and religion appear, but none are woven into any pattern.  The Gate at the Stairs is less a novel than several mismatched short stories masquerading as a novel.  Not only is this disappointing from a writer of Moore’s flair and expertise, it’s devastating.

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A version of this review first appeared in The Courier-Mail in October 2009.