Quite a character - just not an entirely plausible one

September 20, 2009|William H. Pritchard, Globe Correspondent

Although Lorrie Moore has published two novels before this new one, she is much more regarded as a writer of short fiction, especially for her first book “Self-Help’’ and her most recent, “Birds of America.’’

In an impressive story from the later volume, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,’’ a mother recounts the agonizing experience of her baby’s hospitalization for a cancerous tumor on his kidney. Naturally the woman and her husband are horrified; but what makes the horror a little worse is the reassuring language of the oncologist, as he speaks of “a little light chemo,’’ involving the substance dactinomycin. After he leaves, the woman says to her husband, “A little light chemo. Don’t you like that one . . . Eine kleine dactinomycin. I’d like to see Mozart write that one up.’’ The wit, as with Moore generally, is fierce, “funny’’ only in a way that crosses over into the painful.

“I distracted myself with language,’’ says the narrator of “A Gate at the Stairs,’’ and such distraction is central to most of the novel’s characters but especially to Tassie Keltjin, a university student in a Midwestern city named Troy (“The Athens of the Midwest’’).

Tassie’s parents and younger brother live in nearby Dellacrosse Central where her father raises gourmet vegetables and potatoes, which he supplies to élite restaurants in Chicago. For Tassie, whose brain she tells us is “on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir,’’ Dellacrosse and its inhabitants constitute “a kind of jokey curse from the start.’’ Like his daughter, Tassie’s father is practiced at making up original responses. When his son Robert, stumbling through high school, brings home a report card that sports four F’s and a D, Dad remarks, “Well, Robert, what can I say . . . It looks like you’re spending too much time on one course.’’ Robert, also a wit, thinks of opening an alternative to Holiday Inn called “The Normal Night Out Hotel.’’

But it is Tassie who gets the most opportunities to make “jokey curses.’’ Speaking of her parents as “quasi retired,’’ she confides how much she loves the word quasi instead of “sort of’’: “ ‘I am quasi ready to go,’ I would announce. Or, ‘I’m feeling a bit quasi today.’ ’’ The quasi riff occurs more than once in the novel, and it raises a question about Tassie early on: How much do we believe in her as a source of independent verbal comedy? How much is she rather the vehicle through which Moore can get off, one after another and in profusion, jokey play that distracts, in more than one sense, from the larger action of the novel.