A Gate at the Stairs v. The Book of Night Women
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OPENING ROUND
A Gate at the Stairs
v. The Book of Night Women
Judged by C. Max Magee
C. Max Magee created and edits The Millions. He has appeared on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” and Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midmorning” and has written for Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, and various other online and dead-tree publications. He and his wife live in Philadelphia. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “John Wray, Victor LaValle, and Wells Tower have contributed pieces to my web site. I’ve emailed with Tower on a couple of occasions.”
Resolved: The ToB should limit itself to fun books only. I say this as a judge who just powered through a pair of draining books—neither of which I finished feeling ecstatic about—and who now must deliver a verdict, sliding one book along to the next bracket. Why couldn’t I be the guy who drew the token YA book or graphic novel? Or should I be flattered that the Rooster gods deemed me worthy of the challenge?
I found myself faced with this question: As a reader, do you prefer a book whose author set out to portray the quotidian and accomplished this in pyrotechnic fashion, or do you prefer a book that aims for the epic, powerful, and spectacular and falls short, instead offering a sometimes thrilling, sometimes shambling novel?
The former in this case is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. The cover of this book is comically weird. The book many times refers to gates at the stairways leading into houses and to gates atop staircases inside houses. The cover shows, marooned in a vacant and hazy dust field, an old-fashioned staircase of the sort one might have used to enter a plane in the 1950s. I don’t like literal covers any more than the next book snob, and this cover is both literal and incorrect in its interpretation of the book title. Or so it seems to me anyway.
The text contains some incongruities as well. Tassie Keltjin is an at times astonishingly introverted college student, who, essentially friendless, seems to be wandering through her college experience in a dense fog. She takes a job as a nanny for a couple so supercilious and privileged that they hire her prior to actually acquiring a child. If all of this sounds sort of small-potatoes to you, you’re not alone. After this white couple—Sarah, a chef, and Edward, a professor—adopt a daughter of mixed race, they begin to see themselves as, if not oppressed per se, then under threat of imminent oppression.
They start a support group for multiracial families, and here Moore produces pages of cringe-worthy dialogue snippets. One thinks that Moore is being wryly critical of lip-service liberalism, but she also offers a white kid with a mohawk leaning out a car window in broad daylight in the middle of what we’ve been told is a hyper-liberal college town to yell the n-word at a baby. I know racism is all around us, but this is all eerily reminiscent of the movie Crash.
Tassie, meanwhile, is beguilingly opaque, and though she clearly is not a misanthrope, she seems to have no meaningful relationships with anyone outside her family. She’s friendless in a way that doesn’t make sense, and this felt to me like a failing of the book.
What kept the book from being insufferable is that Lorrie Moore can really write (as her many fans know). In fact, it was a relief that a good chunk of the book seemed to be about the weather. An excerpt: “It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath.” I could read that all day. Still, it could not save this book.
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At any rate, to pit Moore’s exploration of racial attitudes and adoption in a college town against the fierce turn-of-the-19th-century Jamaican slaves in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women is unfair. Epithets from mohawked adolescents are beyond trivial alongside the beatings, rape, and murder that James offers up unflinchingly.
Night Women, narrated in a slave patois (not unlike last year’s Rooster winner), follows green-eyed Lilith and her fellow slaves, especially a clutch of Ancient Greek-surnamed women: Gorgon, Hippolyta, Callisto, Homer, etc. The book derives its energy from its moment in history. Slaves newly stolen from Africa rub elbows with those stolen and sold from their mothers on plantations across the island. Africa, a distant memory, nevertheless looms close at hand in the speech of the slaves and in the mysticism and magic that run through their lives.
Lilith, at the novel’s center is, relatively speaking, charmed, and avoids, thanks to the maneuverings of the head house slave Homer, certain death at the hands of the plantation’s enforcers for killing one of their number. The book, ultimately and fascinatingly, plumbs Lilith’s internal battle pitting her desire to exact revenge on her oppressors against her need to feel something other than hate and fear.
As this dilemma suggests, these aren’t the saintly, burdened slaves typical in literature. They are filled with pettiness and betrayal, ugliness and vulgarity (the vulgarity alone is as inventive as it is pervasive throughout Night Women). Likewise, Jamaica’s white slave-owning class isn’t just distant and brutal. James paints them as venal, rapacious, predatory monsters.
Taken together, the Africa-inflected language, the powerful, mystical female protagonists, and the unflinching portrayal of life as a slave unlucky enough to end up on a Jamaican sugar plantation make for a riveting and exhausting read.
Alas, Night Women is also so full and unwieldy a novel that it at times threatens to come apart. Lilith’s story alone cannot support the book’s more than 400 pages. Nearly identical scenes recur chapters apart. Other scenes are too muddled to decipher. Key details and concepts are awkwardly wedged into the plot.
Despite these failings, Night Women will no doubt capture the interest of many readers with its energy and ambition, and Marlon James’s scrappy effort deserves to make it through to the next round over Lorrie Moore’s polished, sometimes sublime, but ultimately disappointing book.
Advancing:
The Book of Night Women
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: I am a longtime reader/admirer of C. Max Magee (and like you, John, he gets extra points for being a former Chicagoan to boot). Also I haven’t yet read The Book of Night Women, about which many people have told me excellent things. I’m also told Lorrie Moore’s work is polarizing. So even though this is our first no. 4 seed to defeat a no. 1 in 2010, I won’t call this decision a shocker.
In fact, I can’t really argue with Judge Magee’s points, taken individually. (I don’t believe an author should be penalized for the cover of her book, as in most cases she probably had almost nothing to do with it, but I can’t dispute that the cover affects the experience of reading.) There is one sentence, however, where I don’t think he goes far enough. He says, “Lorrie Moore can really write.”
Yeah.
There are thousands and thousands of novelists who write better prose than I do. But the vast majority of them write sentences I can aspire to. That inspire me to be better. Lorrie Moore writes sentences I cannot write. I read her the way Andy Van Slyke must have watched films of Willie Mays.
Her writing is so good that, for me, it trumps everything else. There’s not much plot between the covers here. Not everything about the characters makes perfect sense, as Judge Magee points out. And I don’t care. When you read her your mind feels it has skates on, gliding effortlessly from page to page. It was absolutely one of my favorite books of the year.
I read an interview with her several months ago in which the interviewer made some assumption about why people read her books. Moore interrupted him and said something like, “That’s funny. I thought people just read for the company.”
Lorrie Moore is damn good company.
John: This matchup was brutal for me. These were two of the best books I read last year, period. I had planned to read A Gate at the Stairs the moment it came out but was put off by the mixed reviews. Thankfully, it’s inclusion in the Tournament tipped me off the fence because I loved it.
Like you say, Moore’s prose is amazing. At one point she describes road kill thusly:
Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialog balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive.
I think I just stopped and admired it for a while. Not only is there music there—soft, scarlet, spilled—but the concrete imagery of likening the guts to a dialog balloon is just perfect. I’d be happy to read a book by Lorrie Moore entirely about moldering food:
The Mexican strawberries in the refrigerator had grown the wise and cheery beards of Santa Claus, and some Peruvian pears were cauled with mold. The cream cheese was a tub of dull green clay.
I just love that shit. Nicholson Baker’s Paul Chowder (of The Anthologist) would have a field day doing scansion on it.
But like you say, Lorrie Moore is polarizing. For every rave there appears to be a rant. My friend Teddy Wayne, who is also a writer, almost couldn’t believe that I loved the book. He notes (correctly, I think) that Moore doesn’t manage to create a believable sense of verisimilitude that Tassie Keltjin, a 19-year-old college student, is narrating these events. He notes the relentless punning that every character indulges in. He points out that Tassie seems curiously passive throughout the entire book, as though she isn’t living her own life.
And yet, I didn’t care about any of those qualms because I just fell hard for the companionship the book provided me. I think some of the problem is that Moore isn’t acknowledged as what she clearly is (to me), a postmodern writer. Teddy sees A Gate at the Stairs as an attempt to create a generally realist coming-of-age novel, whereas I see all of her work (not just this novel) as essentially a mapping of Lorrie Moore’s very lively, utterly unique brain.
Kevin: I read a critique of A Gate at the Stairs in which the reviewer called it, with effective, attention-grabbing, Peckesque hyperbole, “(perhaps) the worst novel by a ‘name’ writer I have ever read.”
In the Birnbaum-Tobias Wolff interview you mentioned yesterday, Wolff said someone once defined the novel as “a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.” The imperfect nature of the form is what makes literary criticism such delicious sport. If you want to dislike a novel you can make almost any claim against it and cherry-pick a passage that will back you up. Our literary opinions are so tangled with our emotions that your relationship with a particular novel is a lot like your relationship with a sibling. It depends on what and how much you are willing to forgive.
John: If you go to Moore looking for mimesis, you’re going to be sorely disappointed, and in looking at some of those negative takes linked above, I think that’s why these readers come away hugely disappointed. Even some of the positive reviews take her to task for some of the shortcomings as measured against a realist ideal. Rather than being created as independent characters, she populates the book with figures that are really just an extension of herself, hence the relentless punning, and the lack of interest in traditionally structured scenes or plot. The dialog comes off as “unreal” because we’re not reading dialog but Moore’s interior monologue split among characters.
And I loved it. Loved. It.
And yet, in this particular matchup, it would’ve been a Sophie’s Choice, but I also would’ve chosen Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women as the winner. If you have time to read any of the unread titles still in the Tournament, let me suggest this one. I thought it was an amazing, powerful, propulsive read. C. Max Magee compares it, justifiably so, to last year’s tourney champ, A Mercy, and I agree except to say that The Book of Night Women is way better. It hit me with a force similar to The Known World by Edward P. Jones, which is to say it bowled me over.
Sure, I could maybe share some of Magee’s qualms, that maybe the book could’ve been trimmed by 15 percent, but once again, the overall effect quieted any internal dissenting voices. I could go on, but since we’re going to have it in the next round, I’ll kick it back to you for now.
Kevin: Your admiration for The Book of Night Women is reflected in your confidence rankings, in which you had it rated second in the field. In one contest, the lead I have held through the first five matches evaporates. We are now dead even, 61-61.
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