Books
Pun for your life
by Jolisa Gracewood
Funny ha-ha becomes funny peculiar in Lorrie Moore’s first novel in more than a decade.
Death, in Lorrie Moore’s shattering new novel, is “the loneliest and most dumbfounding thing”. It’s a punchline without a joke. Which, perversely, makes it the perfect subject matter for this inveterate punster and sad clown genius.
A Gate at the Stairs is Moore’s first novel in more than a decade. Ostensibly, it is the tale of a year in the life of Tassie Keltjin, a 20-year-old farm girl turned college student. Crucially, that year begins with the winter of 2001, when “the events of September – we did not yet call them 9/11 – seemed both near and far”. This monumental shadow hangs over the novel as it unravels from campus bildungsroman into a startling meditation on death, grief and the limits of language.
At first, we are safely in the realm of dark social comedy. In search of nannying work, Tassie is snapped up by forty-something Sarah Brink, a brisk, brittle career chef preparing to adopt a biracial child. Tassie regards Sarah and her creepily detached husband with merry perplexity, and is simultaneously intrigued and appalled by the machinery of adoption: the fallen women and girls, the bossy social workers, the bereft foster mothers.
Moore makes wicked hay of this material, skewering Tassie’s undergraduate pretensions and the older couple’s anxieties in her inimitable way. The youthful narrative voice occasionally rings false, but is reliably droll. “That’s a load of crap,” blusters one parent at the weekly support group for interracial families, and Tassie muses to herself, on cue, “I had once seen a load of crap. It was carried to our house in Don Edenhaus’s truck and dumped right at our barn for composting into fertilizer.”
Things trundle along amusingly enough. Mary-Emma, the adopted child, becomes the sweet beating heart of the story, and Tassie takes on an increasingly maternal role while juggling the demands of life-changing classes, her absent flatmate, her distant family and an alluring new boyfriend. Everything is illuminated by Moore’s lemony wit: even the mouldering bread in Tassie’s neglected fridge has a hue that “would have made lovely eyeshadow for a showgirl”.
And then the novel takes a hairpin turn, and then another, and another. Terrible news is delivered sideways, furiously or tragically late. The piling-up of horror and coincidence risks dramatic overkill, but I suspect overkill is precisely Moore’s point. As if to underline Tassie’s shellshock, the novel ascends into the realm of surrealism; not Salvador Dali so much as René Magritte, with his impeccable apples and hollow men, or Haruki Murakami with his matter-of-fact bottomless wells.
It’s a daring (and slightly bonkers) choice on the part of the author. Funny ha-ha becomes funny peculiar, in that everything in this book still looks “real”, and yet things simply could not happen the way Moore says they do. It’s either a risible car-wreck or a stunning coup de théâtre, and you will either buy it or you won’t.
I confess, I bought it, and was devastated. “What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling,” says Tassie, “and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.” An absurdly beautiful pastoral interlude delivers not closure, but an open wound: it’s fall again, and autumnal gold cruelly litters the country roads. “How like the end of love to leave a beautiful corpse,” notes Tassie bleakly.
Ultimately, this is a parable about lost innocence, and our dreadful complicity in both innocence and its loss. “We loved our lives more than we ever knew,” Tassie keens, “and at the end felt the bounty of them.” Useful knowledge, painfully gleaned; the world ends and yet the world spins on, and the best and worst of it is there’s another one born every minute. “Life was unbearable, and yet everywhere it was borne,” writes Moore. She can pun, but we can’t hide. This is literature as punchline and lifeline.
A GATE AT THE STAIRS, by Lorrie Moore (Faber and Faber, $38.99).
