Wit and woe in the Midwest

FICTION: A Gate at the Stairs, By Lorrie Moore, Faber and Faber, 322pp. £16.99

A Gate at the Stairsis a Bildungsroman, a state-of-the-nation novel, an interrogation of racism and class in the US, an exploration of motherhood and a 9/11 narrative. All the more surprising, then, that it comes from Lorrie Moore whose name has been made in the short form (her Collected Storiesappeared last year) and the essentially domestic. But the segue into a novel of large themes shouldn't frighten any Moore fans off; it certainly hasn't frightened her. Despite the breadth of its ambition and the solemnity of the subject matter, there is an abundance of wit, linguistic dexterity and Moore's trademark sense of savage comedy in these pages.

We are in the months immediately after September 11th, 2001, although the event itself is only referred to directly once in the narrative – and then only in a jokey aside. Tassie Keltjin, daughter of a potato farmer, is in her first year at university in Troy, the university town of her home state in the Midwest. Tassie is a typical Lorrie Moore heroine: smart, curious and quick with words, with a wit beyond her years – sometimes, it has to be said, uncharacteristically and too knowingly so. ('Awesome,' I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either 'sucked' or was ' awesome'. We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.")

In between classes – Introduction to Sufism, Soundtracks to War Movies, Yoga, Wine Tasting (Moore often takes sideswipes at trendy academia) – Tassie gets a job as a childminder with an overachieving top-end chef, Sarah Brink, and her sexually enigmatic husband, Edward Thornwood. The thing is there’s no child. This couple are doing the rounds of private adoption agencies and are so assiduous and politically correct, it would seem, that they employ Tassie well before the event. She – and we in the process – witness several frightful and (as always with Moore) hilarious set-pieces involving interviews with prospective trailer-trash birth mothers, before the couple adopt Mary, a biracial toddler.

Tassie settles into a rather uneasy alliance with Sarah, whose volatile temperament and spiky political correctness keep her permanently on edge. "Yes," she said. " 'I Been Working on the Railroad.I've heard her sing that. There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labour . . . be careful what you sing. It's an issue when raising kids of colour."

When little Mary is subjected to racial taunts on the street, Sarah sets up a support group for adoptive parents of mixed-race children. Behind the eponymous gate on the stairs, Tassie eavesdrops on these conversations that become a chattering classes’ Greek chorus in the narrative:

“And don’t get me started on Islam!”

“And why are we so hateful about black Muslims, for decades those Chicago neighbourhoods have been tense about every god-damn mosque and yet we went way out of our way for those honky Bosnian Muslims?”

" Honky Bosnian Muslims?"

“Honey, be quiet and just drink.”

"A suffering sweepstakes – now there's a fool's game. Who invented the term suffering sweepstakesanyway?"

Although she treats these sessions with a native scepticism, Tassie’s loyalties are already under strain, leavened only by a budding romance with a fellow student, the jaunty Reynaldo, a Brazilian.

At Christmas when she returns to her hometown – its only claim to fame is as the extraterrestrial sightings capital of the world – it’s she who feels like the alien in the company of her hard-working father, her strangely abstracted mother and her troubled younger brother, Robert, who’s considering joining the army. Thus the world slyly begins to exert its influence.

For a novel concerned with large themes, much of it is taken up with small shifts in mood and nuance as Tassie negotiates the transitions in her life. She shuttles between worlds, from her solitary flat to the packed student halls, from the self-satisfied comfort of Sarah’s middle-class, suburban world to Reynaldo’s hermetically sealed immigrant-style existence. When he suddenly dumps her, Tassie experiences not only her first heartbreak but a dawning sense of numb uncertainty and an unravelling of her trust not just in people but in life itself. She discovers that Reynaldo is not, as he has claimed, a Brazilian, but a Muslim from Hoboken, New Jersey, working for “an Islamic charity”. In a moment, someone harmless has become a threat.

Sarah, too, makes a confession, confiding in Tassie about an episode from her past that will make the reader, particularly the parent reader, blanch. (Moore is particularly acute on horrifying maternal scenarios – in Terrific Mother, a story in her prize-winning collection Birds of America,a woman's life is doomed when she accidentally drops a friend's baby and kills it.) Sarah's admission is in the same league. Not only does it take Tassie aback, it forces the reader to re-evaluate all of Sarah's brittleness, her unsatisfactory marriage, her strangely insecure mothering. It also sends Moore's narrative into plot overdrive.

IF THERE'S ANYTHING TO CRITICISEin this novel, it's the pacing. It seems top-light, with all the action crammed into the latter pages. Tassie ignores a letter from her beloved brother, to her deep regret, and she makes a spirited but doomed attempt to save Sarah and Edward from losing Mary when the finalising of the adoption is threatened. Some of the plot devices seem too melodramatic. The deathly hors d'oeuvre Sarah creates (who else but Lorrie Moore would concoct a suicide dip?) that ends up inadvertently being eaten by Tassie's flatmate and almost kills her, seems more Miss Marple than Lorrie Moore. But it is another death, much closer to home and with little or no foreshadowing, that brings Tassie's annus horribilisto a close.

The losses come relentlessly, the big and the small alike, without seeming to be granted any hierarchy of value by the author. A refusal to set down a suffering sweepstakes, perhaps? Like life, in other words. Whether a novel can afford to be this lifelike without the form suffering is another question.

Moore’s deftness can sometimes be mistaken for flippancy, but it’s exactly this lightness of touch and her determinedly oblique approach to her themes that make this novel deceptively powerful. It’s not self-important about its material, but, despite all the wicked wit, make no mistake, this is a deadly serious novel.

Mary Morrissy is a novelist, short story writer and a teacher of creative writing