Lorrie Moore redux

I stayed up late last night finishing A Gate At The Stairs, and figured I ought to address my thoughts on it before they slip away. I'm not sure why I haven't seen this in any review of the book, but it's one of the strangest novels I've read in a long time--kind of a train wreck, in fact, albeit one that is consistently gripping and beautiful.

Like Rhian, I love Lorrie Moore, and consider her one of my strongest contemporary influences--indeed, she's a hero of mine. I even kind of love the new book, after a fashion. But A Gate At The Stairs makes no sense. Can we be the only people who have noticed this? There is an ostensible plot--a twenty-year-old woman becomes the babysitter for an adopted mixed-race toddler--which in and of itself is perfectly good. (I particularly appreciated the character of the mother, a guilt-wracked restauranteur.)

But Moore seems to have taken a strong, fairly short narrative--one that was not quite finished--and, instead of developing and shaping it further, garlanded it with all manner of bizarre subplots. A long section gives Tassie, the narrator, a Brazilian boyfriend. Then he turns out not to be Brazilian, and in fact is clearly planning a terrorist bombing--but there is no terrorist bombing, and in fact Tassie never mentions him again. There is a story line about Tassie's family, which is purely descriptive for hundreds of pages, then suddenly sprouts a plot--will Tassie's brother join the military?--and this plot then terminates in a scene so revolting, implausible, and gratuitous that I couldn't believe I was reading it. The adoption line is filled with intrigue--strange people outside the house, wordless heavy-breathing phone calls--but it's all red herrings. In fact, the baby plot, which we're to have understood was the main story, just kind of fizzles out a hundred pages from the end and never returns. There is an email Tassie inexplicably doesn't bother to read, which later proves to have been The Key To Everything. There are three separate but almost identical scenes of just people talking about racism, overheard from the next room, and whole sections that are just lists of wildflowers or types of food. It all feels...random. It is never uninteresting, not even for a minute, because Moore is a genius of the sentence. But the big picture is utterly incoherent.

The oddest thing of all, though, is the narrative voice--though the book is supposed to be told, in the first person, by a 28-year-old Tassie of the future, the eloquent, discursive narrator bears no resemblance at all to the demure rock bassist that has been presented to us. It is nearly impossible to imagine Tassie talking this way--the narrator of course is Moore herself, and the gulf between them is enormous. Moore's voice also infects all the dialogue, making everybody (all the educated people, anyway) sound identically blessed with mordant wit. (The book is very, very funny.)

I don't presume to know what happened here--I've never seen anything like it. The prose is some of the best I have read in an American novel in twenty years, while the story feels like a first draft, or worse, a desk drawer full of notes. And yet...like I said...I kind of love it. Moore constantly surprises me, which (to quote her) is more than I can say about some people.

The National Book Award nominees will be announced in a couple of weeks, and Moore is going to win, mostly out of collective embarrassment that she didn't win it for Birds of America. (Was that brillant, brutal story collection even nominated? Insanely enough, I don't think it was.) Well--my money's on her, anyway, in spite of everything. Read A Gate At The Stairs, but know that it is one batshit crazy novel, a mad scientist of a book, and the most unlikely bestseller I've ever read.

The Man Who Wrote Too Much

Pardon the week-long hiatus--we're both, lord help us, writing. Today, though, I finally threw in the towel and decided to print out a fresh draft of my novel for Rhian to read. Every time, I think this is the one she's going to race through in a day, then say, "It's perfect, send it off." And every time I'm wrong. (She is responsible for the removal of an embarrassingly ill-fitting element from Castle.) In any event, even if it sucks, it's nice to have it out of my hands, if only for a week.

This is the tenth novel I have actually written, counting the ones that didn't get published, and I'm beginning to wonder maybe if I'm writing too fast. This is a fault I have always felt free to find in other writers, but haven't really ever taken seriously the notion that it's one of mine, as well. In general I produce a (so far) publishable one every two years, and have done a couple even faster than that.

And usually I'm satisfied with the results, more or less. But last night I was reading this new Lorrie Moore. I like it, and I have always looked up to Moore as kind of a hero. But above and beyond that, the book has a particular quality my work lacks--it feels carefully composed, worked over. It's written...exquisitely. It feels like somebody's first novel in ten years.

Of course, there's something to be said about a book that feels unburdened, that you can read quickly, that skates along in an uninterrupted progression of thoughts. This is what I tell myself I'm writing. That my stuff is qualitatively different because of my pace, and this is a neither good nor bad thing.

But then again, think of the popular writers who publish a lot. T. C. Boyle. Joyce Carol Oates. Even if you really dig them (and there is a lot to like about these writers), admit it--you sometimes think they publish too much. You kind of wish they would calm the hell down and go into hiding for ten years. There's a slight taint to the respect we have for them, because of their output. It's not even necessarily about quality--even if they published the same damned books, unchanged from the versions we know, and just spaced them out to every five years, we would probably convince ourselves that these books are better, because they appear to be the result of years and years of effort.

That's not the main thing, though--the prose is the main thing. And while I don't want to emulate Lorrie Moore, I am thinking that the next book I write will be much shorter and much more finely wrought. (I think I already know what it is, a novel I've been wanting to write for nearly a decade, ever since a graduate student suggested it to me after reading a little metafiction I published in a local newspaper.) And if I know what's good for me, when I'm finished, I'll wait ten years before putting it in the mail.