A Gate at the Stairs begins in December, 2001, three months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. That fact doesnt seem to color the book, thoughin spite of the fact that the narrators boyfriend / lover turns out to be Muslim and disappears himself abruptly, protesting that whatever people may say, he is not a member of a cell. I suppose we can believe him in retrospect. After all, in the years up to the publication of this book there were not any successful subsequent domestic attacks.
First impressions. The narrator, Tassie Keltjin, an eighteen or nineteen year old girl (woman? girl?), is quirky and a tad macabre. In the first paragraph of the book (p.4), she imagines for us stunning heaps of dead birds, explaining that she is uncomfortable with a false promise of delicacy. Soon (p.9), she is telling us about the anger in her relationship with her mothermy scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth. This is shaping up to be one scary chick. Three pages later, the author puts in the mouth of Sarah, the woman Tassie will work for as a nanny, the story of the sadistic German shepherd dog next door who has learned to sucker its companion, a none-too-bright terrier, into getting zapped repeatedly by the invisible electric fence that surrounds their yard. Maybe its the author whos scary.
The next gross-out moment is Tassie telling us (p.24) she saw a squirrel hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth. Then (p.25) she shares with us her roommates view of stadiums: stadiums were where insurgents were shot. Its a laugh a minute. Not.
Eventually, (p.31) we get a bit of levity leavened with self-deprecation a propos the menu at Perkins Restaurant in Kronenkee: Bottomless beverages for the greedy and thirstyI feared I was both.
Tassie goes home for Christmas. We meet (p.45) the Hannukah hemlock, a plastic pine from Hammacher Schlemmer (an upscale home, this), with problematical decorations. Possibly … this was just how all irony presented itself. Then she describes the holiday card my mother sent out … an October photo captioned The children. In some dead leaves. I laughed. Then more self-deprecation: the heated meat of myself (p.48) and the not-charming tale of the puppy-poop Christmas present Tassie gave her brother one year.
In spite of Tassies animus towards her mother, her mother gets some of the good linesthe author will put oddball bon mots in anyones mouth Having no dog in the race doesnt keep people from having extremely large cats. (p.53); and, describing the bridesmaids dresses for a friend of Tassies wedding as, What Scarlett OHara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber. (p.65) But apparently Christmas aint like it used to be, Tassie muses. Where was the turkey, its yankable heart in a baggie jammed up its butt? (p. 54) So, I am asking myself: Is Tassie just passive aggressive or is she really psycho?
More mother-bashing, Tassies brother, Robert, had always been my mothers favorite. Where had that gotten him? My mothers love was useless. (p.60) On reflection, Im not sure I think love is supposed to be useful, anyway. Supportive, yes. Affirming, yes. Useful? If its not useful are we supposed to be able to do without it? Disdain it? Theres something wrong with the implied values here, and that seems to be the authors point about Tassie.
Im looking for signposts here. What does the author want to tell us? A possible clue appears. A standalone, one-sentence, italicized paragraphhey, this must be important, or maybe profound (p.74):
We stand around blankly as walls.
Anomie. Waiting for Godot? No, just blankly. Not even waiting. Zen without enlightenment,
Do I care about Tassie? Would I read any further if this werent an Assigned Book? The author is promisingwell, broadly hinting, anywaythat Tassie will be forced to react to something that, as the author might put it, kicks her butt out of her glib and practiced disdain for and distance from life. I read on. Later, I was glad I did, but it was after still another hundred pages or so of stuff. I jot down the following dialog with myself. Q: Am I having fun yet? A: Well, Im making lots of notes. Suddenly, on page 204, when Reynaldo leaves abruptly, I became engrossed, unwilling to make notes because I didnt want to interrupt the flow of my reading. That feeling continued pretty much unabated to the end of the novel. So, yes, on balance, I liked the book.
To make it to page 204, I had to make do with whatever charm and humor I could find in the intervening text. In the metaphor department, the author produces some real clunkers, but there are some gems, too:
PhDs or unfinished dissertations on … the hegemonic hedges of Versailles (p.74)
[A variant of my favorite make-believe dissertation topic: the history of ibid.]
… my father didnt have all that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung out his arms and said, Someday, kids, all this will be yours. but his knuckles had hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasnt that big. (p.76)
[Another of the ways irony presents itself]
Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? (p.79)
[A riff worthy of Peter Friedman]
This, [Sarah] said, is why God invented the fetal position. … Her features had fallen but I saw her lift them again, one by one, the way one rights light porch furniture after a wind…. We waited near the mens room. He just wasnt there. I thought the mens room should also have a big yellow sign that said HERTZ. (p.81)
[Stood up in Green Bay by Sarahs husband]
They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me. (p.98)
[Sarah and Edward snipe at one another in front of Tassie.]
…I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time. (p.124)
I lay there fretful as a Bartók quartet. (p.125)
A restaurant was a science, [Sarah] would tell me, not a square dance. Perhaps that was where she got it wrong. (p.127)
I have arranged for some risotto to be FedExed to her (p. 131)
[from Sarahs note to Tassie about what to feed Mary-Emma]
[Mary-Emma] would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doingthe opposite of my childhoodand so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didnt matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same. (p. 134)
[Such a sad world view. Depressing.]
I tried to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science. (p.136)
[tuneless spark? bypassed poetry and entered science? This is pure gibberish!]
What punctuation as strong as aeronautic stitchery would I know to bring with me? The apostrophe in dont held together by our bubble gum and seeds? It would do. For a moment or two. (p.308)
[Being at a loss for words does not stop the author from writing them. I suppose this is an attempt to capture Tassies inchoate feelings of regret and if only, but it jarred me completely out of the flow of the narrative.]
One looked out the window … through pointed icicles that were like the incisors of a shark; it was as if one were living in the cold dead mouth of a very mean snowman.
(p. 141) [cold dead mouth Brrrrrrrrr! Yuck!]
Thats a load of crap!
I had once seen a load of crap. It was carried to our house in Don Edenhauss truck and dumped right at our barn for composting into fertilizer. (p.157)
[I found this amusing, but when the author uses the same rhetorical structure again on p. 196 (a crock), p. 199 (a horses patoot), and p. 200 (bullshit), it went from amusing to overdone. The author is trying to be funny and its like a stand-up comic who tries too hard and gets dead silence from the audience.]
Did you teach the children a song about eating live animals? (p. 159)
[Sarahs mock-reprimand to Tassie for entertaining the children with There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly]
The Wednesday evening parents-of-children-of-color support group makes me want to press the fast-forward button. Its like being lectured with sound bites. Okay. Racism is a problem, but Im not finding any deep insights here.
On the other hand, the concrete encounters in the narrativethe name calling, the unspoken disapproval, the condescension, the drive-bys with an aggressively racist song boomingmake the point just fine. Better, in fact.
I saw again and again what it was simply to walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience. (p.168)
Do you think they could get together for a playdate someday? … Maddie doesnt have any African-American friends, and I think it would be good for her to have one.
Im sorry, I said to the woman, but Mary-Emma already has a lot of white friends. (p.229)
Sarahs husband Edward is certainly a piece of work. Take his reaction to Tassies concern about her brother possibly joining the military:
What does not kill him will make him stronger, he added prosaically, needlepoint Nietzsche.
Yes, but what if it does kill him? (p.180)
And while were on the subject of dieing, consider the Woody Allen spin the author puts on Tassies fantasy about Reynaldo.
If he had loved me, or even if hed just said so, I would have died of happiness. But that didnt happen. So I didnt die of happiness. Words for a tombstone: SHE DIDNT DIE OF HAPPINESS. (p.194)
Nice. But the people who do die are Gabriel (Sarah/Susan and Edward/Johns son) and Robert (Tassies brother). Two innocents. About Gabriel, we know next to nothing. About Robert, we know that he is even more lost than Tassie. After his high school graduation, Tassie observes that, He was working hard to sound upbeat and had landed on bizarrely merry. (p.266). Tassie understands Robert, but doesnt quite understand that it is to her that he is looking for some way through his confusion. I could see he was desperate for the knowledge and reasoning behind anything. I could see he felt shorthanded, underequipped, factually and otherwise. (p.266) Only after Robert has died does Tassie discover, from reading his last email to her, that she missed an opportunity to try at least to helpto be of use to him, if you will. Maybe love is useful, after all.
Loss, loss, loss, loss: Gabriel, Reynaldo, Mary-Emma, Robert. Not to mention Sarahs poisonous tapenade that almost does in Murph, the effective disappearance of Sarah, and the demise of Le Petit Moulin. By the time the book ends, Tassie has encountered loss in many forms. She didnt die, so maybe Nietzsche was right, it made her stronger. Thats what happens in a Bildungsroman.
In the finale, Ed Thornwood calls (p.316) to hit on Tassieit was clear all along that she was on his hit listhe, whom Sarah describes as the punishing, faithless father whose idea of racial equality is to bring a rainbow coalition into his bed. As I said, a real piece of work. Would Tassie like to go to dinner with him sometime? The mind boggles. So does Tassie. And the book ends (p. 321) with Tassie the narrator addressing us directly for the first and only time.
Reader, I did not even have coffee with him.
That much I learned in college.
A most satisfying conclusion.
So, age has come upon Tassie. She has had her fingers pressed, as Tennessee Williams put it, on the fiery Braille of reality. Is she a different person for it? I dont think so. Does she discover that she is a different person from the person she had assumed (and presented) herself to be? Yes. She has faced some of the devastating events that just happen in life and she didnt explode into murderous mayhem nor did she retreat into feelingless isolation. She learns that Life Goes On … as, indeed, it does; and thats better than the alternative. Fun, even. Sometimes.