Lorrie Moore

In her new novel, "A Gate at the Stairs," Lorrie Moore casts her sardonic gaze on the Midwest, motherhood (as handled by certain women), and the confusion of young adult females; but the most biting sarcasm seems to be directed at the forty-ish new mother in the book. Although Moore is not overtly antagonistic to this particular character, much of the description of her makes her sound hugely unappealing. I've only just started the novel (I'm on page 40), but it seems like the story will continue to cast this older woman character in a less-than-attractive light. Her worst character flaw seems to be her sense of self-importance.

What I bridle at is not the fact of this character--I'm sure we've all met forty-ish women who think too much about themselves--and perhaps I'm one of them!--what I dislike is the blanket dismissal of her--and I know it's a story told from the main character's perspective, and the main character is a younger woman, who might quite naturally reject the stodginess of an older woman; but her statement, "These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep"--just makes the younger woman sound uninteresting.

And yet I also know that we all do it; we all generalize about one generation or another. And perhaps Moore is trying to say something deeper about that particular moment in time--right around 9/11--and that place, the Midwest. We'll see. I'll reserve further judgment until I've completed the book. The trouble is, though--I'm not all that thrilled with the overall tone of the novel, and I'm not taken with any of the characters. I admit that those two aspects are perhaps the most important ones for me, when I pick up a novel and decide whether I'm going to slog through it. I have to fall in love with a least a few of the characters, and I have to like the writer's overall tone. Plot doesn't matter as much to me. I've enjoyed a few of Moore's stories, very much, because her particular form of wit, which she maneuvers gracefully between a lighthearted, breezy tone and one as heavy as a sledgehammer, carried me easily through her thin, meandering plots. This time the tone isn't quite right (I'm not sure why) and the characters veer towards caricature. But the novel is currently Number 2 on the Bay Area's bestseller list for fiction, so maybe I'm in the minority in not being entranced by this particular work of hers.