A review by byp
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

2.0

I wish I could give this 2.5 stars. For the first two-thirds of the book, I really did not enjoy reading it. This is mainly due to two things: 1) The narrator uses the past perfect (?) tense a lot. "I didn't know that was the last time I would see him" or "I would never again see that color and not think of her" or "Years later, a boyfriend would ask why I ever believed such a silly thing." It took me out of any sense of tension in the plot, and made me not really care about the characters, because it seemed like their story was over before it was really told. This brings me to problem #2: characters are introduced early on, with clear conflicts, and then aren't even mentioned until the last 60 pages of the book, when the main character realizes, "Oh, yeah! Why haven't I been thinking about these people the whole time?" I realize this is probably intended, but the effect was obnoxious, and made me want to quit the book..

The last third of the book was worth sticking it out, though. Bottom line: I love Lorrie Moore's short stories, and I think this novel would have worked better as a collection of stories about these characters.