'A Gate at the Stairs': a treacherous journey toward adulthood

"A Gate at the Stairs"

by Lorrie Moore

Knopf, 322 pp., $25.95

Tassie, the 20-year-old narrator of this new Lorrie Moore novel, is a quietly jazzy young ironist. She can spot a vein of absurdist black humor in nearly everything — even when her heart is breaking, her trust is betrayed and every adult she depends on proves unreliable.

Lyrical, funny, disturbing and at times brilliantly insightful, "A Gate at the Stairs" follows Tassie as she wends her way into a perplexing and dangerous world of American adulthood.

Though every rite-of-passage novel seems to feature a kookily intellectually precocious heroine these days, there's not much else that's predictable about this electric-bass-playing, Sylvia Path-spouting, motor-scooter-driving, pun-making college kid. Or her encounters with her parents and brother, her first lover and the eccentric married couple who employ her as a part-time nanny for a toddler they hope to adopt.

The tale's setting is a proudly smug, liberal Midwestern college burg called Troy, which might as well be Ann Arbor, Mich., or Madison, Wis.

Tassie has come to study, leaving the hobby farm of her oddball parents. They raise boutique potatoes for super-foodie restaurants, like the one owned by Sarah, foster mother of the adorable, biracial Mary-Emma, a child whose exquisite innocence Tassie tries touchingly to preserve, as her own is leached away.

Sarah and her enigmatic husband, Edward, are strange in ways Tessie senses but can't pin down. That's true also of Reynaldo, the classmate with whom Tassie falls madly and ill advisedly in love.

But everything she believes about the seductive, remote Reynaldo — his nationality, name, religion — turns out to be false. Nor is Sarah all she appears and claims to be.

Moore is best known as a masterful short-story writer ("Birds of America"). And though she sustains the power of most of this novel, her first in a decade, the finale abruptly plunges Tassie into a post-9/11 family tragedy that doesn't flow organically from what comes before.

But much of "A Gate at the Stairs" is uncommonly rich in pithy observations, startling realizations and zany nuggets of satire.

The trendy, semi-useless courses Tassie takes include one devoted to wine tasting (which she gets booted out of, when school officials realize she's under legal drinking age) and another parses the musical scores of war films. (The title of one of her term papers: "The Sufic Hymn of 'The Dirty Dozen.' ")

The chitchat Tassie overhears during Sarah's support group for adoptive parents of children of color is rife with liberal guilt and p.c. smugness.

More upsetting are the random racist incidents Tassie fends off when she's with the unknowing Mary-Emma, and the sense of encroaching menace that suffuses an increasingly fearful, confusing and deadly America.

It gives away nothing to say Tassie is a survivor, and that the solaces of playing music, reading poetry, moral outrage and compassion stand her in good stead. She'll get by, by learning, as she puts it, that "according to the black hole experts, ninety percent of the universe is missing. Still, there was always a circus somewhere."

Misha Berson is the theater critic for The Seattle Times.