I felt there was a lot of relevant commentary in A Gate At the Stairs but too dense to read all at once and buried under a lot of distracting sideways musings that made it hard to pull out the good stuff of the story. Nevertheless, I did decide to finish it this week and finished it this morning.
I kind of had a like it/hate it reaction to this book and in the end I decided I needed to finish it to see where the main character ended up. I actually thought the very last part of the book was better than all the rest of it as Tassie reacts to her brother’s death. I particularly found intriguing her climbing into her brother’s coffin as horrific as it was, it made a real statement about how much we can love someone no matter what state they are in. I found the father’s comments at the funeral particularly poignant and dead on:
“What can a man say about losing his boy?” my father cried out, finally. He had raised his voice as if he were calling. “His only son? Well! I miss him more than any words can remotely convey. He was not just a good son, a good person. He was the very best kind.” That was all he said before his face clenched and purpled and he had to turn and come back down. – Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs.
I also found this idea to be very relevant to our book club reading and one that might help us go beyond the obvious in our discussion in future book club readings:
“I had also learned in literature—perhaps as in life—one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for herself. The creator was inconvenient—God was dead. But the creation itself had a personality and hopes and its own desires and plans and little winks and dance steps and collaged intent. In this way Jacques Derrida overlapped with Walt Disney. The story itself had feet and a mouth, could walk and talk and speak of its own yearnings.”— Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
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