Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
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“‘The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost!’ Post-9/11 Revengeful Narratives in Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs” / Pamela Mansutti
Abstract: In her last novel A Gate at the Stairs (2009), Lorrie Moore follows a twenty-year-old college student’s journey of self-discovery and emancipation as she moves to a medium-sized university town in the Midwest. The young girl, Tassie Keltjin, longs for elaborate and cosmopolitan experiences but meets crudity and shallowness as she crosses the particular chronotope of the story, the algid post-9/11 Midwestern America. Her geographical and existential transition occurs at the turn of 2001 and throughout 2002, when the aftermath of 9/11 begins to penetrate everyone’s ordinary existence in its many degrees and forms of gravity. Interestingly, A Gate at the Stairs does not place the events of 9/11 at its centre, but captures their immediate aftermath in a sleepy, peripheral part of America. Through her brilliant sarcasm, Moore tackles the amnesia, superficiality, brutality and detachment from public life that were always already there in mid-class society and that 9/11 has further unearthed. Most characters in the novel, though, appear ignorant of their own history and/or unresponsive to the complexities of a post-terroristic world. The author treats 9/11 as a possible “revenge motif” that occasionally resurfaces and shatters a fragile and inconsistent humanity by triggering disturbing consequences (clearly unimagined by the characters): from the lack of knowledge about the world and the US political role in it, to the shallow commodification of Arabic symbols, from the militarization of public discourse, to the fascination with exotic masculinity. Instead of reading it as a single catastrophic Ur-phenomenon, Moore uses 9/11 as a disseminated and recurring “structure of disaster and revenge” that seeps into a morally vacuous and uncritical Midwest. Therefore, the cultural constructions of 9/11 in Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs take the form of a nemesis against the amnesia and apathy that many US citizens fail to realize they possess.
Keywords: Literature, Place & Space, Race & Ethnicity
<1> Moore’s latest novel A Gate at the Stairs (2009) follows Tassie Keltjin’s journey of self-discovery and emancipation from the small country town of Dellacrosse to the medium-sized university town of Troy. A twenty-year-old college student interested in Rumi’s poetry and anthropology, wine-tasting and Sufism, Tassie longs for elaborate and cosmopolitan experiences but meets crudity and shallowness as she crosses the particular chronotope of the story, the algid post-9/11 Midwestern America. Her geographical and existential transition occurs, indeed, at the turn of 2001 and throughout 2002, when the aftermath of 9/11 begins to penetrate everyone’s ordinary existence in its many degrees and forms of gravity. Relying on a playful but whipping language, A Gate at the Stairs synchronizes bleak echoes of what so far seems to be the historical matrix of the twenty-first century. For example, the major terrorist attack has frozen intercultural and interracial relationships into a façade of fair-play among Troy’s petty bourgeoisie. There, conversations and social interactions show prudery but exude racism, as people strive to maintain a politically correct milieu while repressing fear, isolation and hate. At the same time, in Dellacrosse’s alienated physical and human landscape, the attack has transformed the war-mongering impulses of US public (and rural) culture into a “distant” participation of youth to the homeland military defense. Furthermore, in this scenario, love is weaker than ever and it may end abruptly because of clashing religious and cultural beliefs that for once prove stronger than sentiments. Tassie finds herself at the crossroads of these three narrative threads, each one of which enlightens a specific tentacle-like extension of 9/11 into society.
<2> Before delving deeper into the story, we must note that it would not be truthful to Moore’s novel to say that 9/11 is its generative center, since Moore focuses on such themes as adoption, racism, adolescent turmoil and parents’ responsibility. On the contrary, 9/11 relates obliquely to such themes, as it indirectly exposes and magnifies the multiple contradictory layers that each of these themes challenges the protagonists with. More specifically, Moore tackles the amnesia, superficiality, brutality and detachment from public life that were always already there in mid-class society, which appears ignorant of its own history and/or unresponsive to the complexities of a post-terroristic world. Since the people from Troy and Dellacrosse look presumptuous, confused and careless about human relationship, moral values, politics and the world at large, destiny retaliates against them. The author constructs subtle narratives of “revenge” for each narrative thread mentioned above, so that history strikes back against the apathy and self-sufficiency that many US citizens fail to realize they possess. In this design, Moore treats 9/11 as a possible “revenge motif” that occasionally resurfaces and shatters a fragile and inconsistent humanity by triggering disturbing consequences (clearly unimagined by the characters): from the ignorance of the larger world and of the US role in it, to the shallow commodification of Arabic symbols, from the militarization of public discourse, to the fascination with an inaccessible exotic masculinity.
<3> Instead of reading it as a single catastrophic Ur-phenomenon, Moore uses 9/11 as a disseminated and recurring “structure of disaster and revenge” that seeps into the sleepy Midwest, where no one really seems to interrogate the cultural and historical significance of terrorism or behaves any differently than before the attacks occurred. Therefore, the cultural constructions of 9/11 take the form of a nemesis in the lives of people who overlook and minimize it. And even when 9/11 is not an explicit narrative “structure of disaster and revenge,” it is used to denounce some limits of Democratic liberal thought on issues of intolerance and moral integrity in a Troy that feels like a desolate post-9/11 New York. Overall, in A Gate at the Stairs “retaliation” is the narrative design that connects 9/11 to issues of racism, adoption, adolescent struggles and parenting: the challenging, insidious aftermath of 9/11 works as a subtle revenge against the deficiencies, inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America. Obviously, Moore is elegant and ironic, not coarsely judgmental: her story is not a critique tout court of current Midwestern middle-class as much as a lucid diagnosis of its illusory alienation after 2001. Tassie’s coming of age will mean, indeed, not only overcoming the difficulties of adolescence, but also dealing with the cynical force of 9/11 and its ensuing metamorphoses.
<4> In other words, Moore’s novel captures the unpredictable consequences of the tragedy of 9/11 as they intrude upon the characters’ experiences and choices in a decentered, suburban America, far away from the big wounded metropolis of New York City and the institutional site of the Pentagon. The verb “intrude upon” is not chosen here at random: it is the verb Moore uses to answer a question about the relationship between her fiction and politics in an interview by Angela Pneuman. Moore explains:
As for the relationship of my writing to politics—in the broadest sense, of course, everything is political, and I am interested in power and powerlessness as it relates to people in various ways. I’m also interested in the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings. All the political things we discuss with our friends are things my characters consider, too.The distance between people and politics is nothing new, of course. Yet the “various ways” by which such distance is deployed tell us something about the quality of the political communication a country is able to establish among its different subjects. While international debates on, and interpretations of 9/11 proliferate, the dull and creepy America of A Gate at the Stairs obliterates both the national bereavement and the political future of the country. As Moore makes clear in an interview for the Madison Review, the role of literature is precisely to expose the truths about the conflicts and political inadequacies of society: “Fiction has the same responsibilities after September 11th that it had before: and that is not to lie” (50). Similarly, Alison Kelly seems to conclude in her volume on Moore that the author looks at 9/11 as another occasion for literature to expose such truths with sarcasm and precision but without necessarily envisioning “anti-American figures” (143).
<5> In Moore’s Midwestern society, then, 9/11 has widened the power gap between official politics and the lives of common people. Neither the government, nor the people are able to create sufficient communicative and critical margins to fathom its significance and impact. “Let’s face it. We are all living in a bubble of some sort” a character comments at one point (157). Like in reality, in the novel media have no explanatory function and we just catch a glimpse of one TV screen showing the falling towers and images of the war in Afghanistan. President Bush is a mere decorative, unwieldy presence on a bumper sticker that says “IF GOD SPEAKS THROUGH BURNING BUSHES, LET’S BURN BUSH AND LISTEN TO WHAT GOD SAYS” (37). And Tassie herself observes at the beginning that:
From our perspective that semester, the events of September – we did not yet call them 9/11 – seemed both near and far. Marching poli-sci majors chanted on the quads and the pedestrian malls, “The chickens have come home to roost! The chickens have come home to roost!” (5)only to divert her thoughts shortly after towards a conversation with her friend Murph, who compares the fall of the towers to the intensity of her marvelous sexual experience on September 10th, saying: “It was a terrible price to pay for love, but it had to be done” (5). And the two girls burst out laughing at the idea that the measure of all things is their personal pleasure – implying that safety (and satisfaction) comes with distance. While the government ignores its own guilt, mishandles the war and abuses its power, most people give up on political agency (with the modest exception of the poli-sci majors) and remain unaware of the larger global scenario, indifferent to change. In this lackluster context, Moore insinuates fateful, scathing narrative revenges that signal how the terrorist attacks have penetrated the US social tissue notwithstanding the lack of a receptive popular conscience.
<6> The main narrative thread concerns the prospective adoption of a child by the wealthy couple of Sarah Thornwood and Edward Brink, who recently moved to town. Attempting to make some extra money while attending college in Troy, Tassie is hired by Sarah as a babysitter but will end up serving as a full backup in the adoption process. Since Edward is always busy and has no apparent interest in the preliminary selection phases – a fact that spoils right away his paternal instincts – Sarah asks Tassie to accompany her and meet the (both Catholic) “birth mothers.” After a first unsuccessful attempt with Amber, a drug-addicted girl on probation who dislikes Sarah’s excessive solicitude, Sarah (this time together with Edward) and Tassie meet Bonnie, a stiff young woman from Wisconsin who let them adopt her Mary-Emma, a “biracial African-American” two-year-old whose father cannot be traced (112). The newly constituted mixed family, then, returns to Troy to begin a new life, yet Sarah and Edward continue to remain as icy and mysterious as the Midwestern “scary fairyland” that surrounds them (119).
<7> In the gloomy wasteland of post-9/11 world, these two characters seem open-minded and virtuous, but suspicion arises that they hide a terrible secret underneath a fake layer of strength and amiability. Sarah runs a high-end restaurant in town, is often on the phone giving instructions to her chefs, and buys potatoes from Tassie’s father, who is a farmer in Dellacrosse. She knows what quality is. A mild Democratic, Sarah wears long knitted scarves and has a “socially constructed laugh” (23) that conceals her nervousness but does not deny her benevolence. As Tassie says when she misunderstands the rules to keep with Bonnie, “Sarah was both pathetic and game. You had to hand it to her.” (94). Far from Sarah’s anxiety is Edward’s coldness, although she admits that to run a restaurant “was a science” (127). Edward does research on eye cancer after having been for a while “interested in breasts” (93). A man completely tactless and ambiguous, he appears a few times in the novel, often making a pass at Tassie that regularly gets ignored. Yet they look a solid couple and, to facilitate a multicultural social life for Mary-Emma, Sarah wants to form a support group with families of mixed ethnic background. She feels that it is necessary to combat the racist attitudes that reign in Troy and that suddenly increased after 9/11.
<8> Notably, Troy is described as a “piece of smug, liberal, recycling, civic-minded monkey masturbation. [A town] that…was gestural, trying to make itself feel good... [A town that] wasn’t real. That was the true crime. Its lack of reality. Whatever that meant.” (153). As the New York terrorist attacks have literally effaced bodies and produced undifferentiated debris a few months earlier, Troy’s “lack of reality” represents its inability to give substance and dignity to the remains of its individuals. While the novel does not explicitly connect Troy with post-9/11 New York, the same sense of death, annihilation and “absence” enshrouds both. The “unreality” of Troy, a mixture of indifference, mystery, violence and paralysis, calls for a reconstruction of human “materiality” and critical agency – of respect, equality and love. The atmosphere in the novel is altogether dim and threatening, blending human and natural entities alike into a flat moral landscape. Troy is full of “wintry neighborhoods” (3) where “all kink and pretentious evil sprang” (102) and it is not dissimilar from “some killing cornfield” (3) of Dellacrosse. Out of this sinister backdrop, 9/11-related discourses on war and race surface, revealing tremendous confusion of values, underlying suspiciousness and lack of future-oriented visions.
<9> While babysitting Mary-Emma and the other couples’ children on the upper floor every Wednesday, Tassie overhears the guests’ conversations and provides us with a portrait of the supposedly open-minded Midwestern middle-class. Faceless voices (except Sarah’s one) state that “racial blindness” and “postracial” are “white idea[s]” (157, 186) and that black people never really integrated themselves into white northern communities. The group stresses the necessity of acknowledging difference and at the same time wonders whether missed black integration is due to “racism or racial inexperience” on both parts (187). And every time the topic moves from African-Americans to Muslims, one guest says “[d]on’t get me started on Islam!” (188, 195), implying that this is an even thornier issue to discuss. If Chicago black Muslims and their “goddamn mosques” should by now be accepted, it is incomprehensible why US engaged with “honky Bosnian Muslims” (i.e. whites) in what they call “a fool’s game” (i.e. the war against Serbia, 188), meaning that US should not look for further alliances with Islamic countries, even if “white.” Mixing religion and ethnicity, “blackness” is often dragged in to critique the supposed white arrogance of the establishment, and yet the dialogue is so snobby and hazy that ends up being apathetic and sterile, with a guest declaring “The rest of the world doesn’t understand the ungovernable diversity of this country” (197). Tassie confesses that she “didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time” (197) and that they sounded like “a spiritually gated community of liberal chat” (186): in spite of their intention to support a multicultural social praxis, this nonconformist bourgeoisie is self-confined and unable to follow up on the discrimination that racist school teachers, waiters and other petty ignorant people in Troy perpetrate on their children.
<10> The algid, childless couples that gather at the Thornwood-Brinks’ house use their adoptive African-American sons and daughters to critique an unfit social scheme and to expose the umpteenth racial stereotype that became “current” after 9/11, that of the “Middle-Eastern.” However, their positions remain speculative. The discursive dynamics of this stuck-up microcosm (rather than a support group) reveal the inconsistencies of liberalism in the aftermath of 9/11. While these representatives of Democratic thought are able to pin down previous historical failures of US politics in dealing with war and cultural diversity, they testify to the fact that small talk will certainly not prevent other failures from occurring. On the one hand, we understand that the attacks of 9/11 stemmed from the past disastrous US cultural politics and only exacerbated already-existing social conflicts; on the other hand, though, we perceive that the future may have more social, economic and racial disarray in store for the country. Cultural interpretations of 9/11 by this supposedly enlightened class are unsatisfactory and, if they suggest a space for critical thinking, they also reveal the inanity and ambiguity of such perspectives.<11> In the Thornwood-Brink’s narrative thread, then, 9/11 is not a narrative structure of revenge per se, but a circumstance that exposes the paralysis of neoliberal thought. However, the motif of revenge is indirectly connected to Sarah and Edward who are despite themselves an example of the “white arrogance” that dominates the physical and intellectual wasteland we described above. In A Gate at the Stairs, in fact, their terrible background strikes back on their present lives and tears them apart. The awful back-story they hide is the unintentional homicide of their son Gabriel, when they still were “Susan” and “John.” A few years earlier, in a moment of hysterical, arrogant “educational” fit and regardless of Sarah’s objections, John abandoned Gabriel on the highway in order to punish him for his tantrums. His intention of picking him up a few minutes later did not have the time to turn into fact: Gabriel died crossing the trafficked lanes after his parents’ car and this fault ruined their lives forever. Thanks to a good lawyer, their sentence was suspended, they changed their names and moved to Troy. But since all “the chickens must come home to roost” in Moore’s narrative design, the adoption agency soon unearths the Thornwood-Brinks’ gruesome past and eventually takes Mary-Emma away from them – a child that, paradoxically, should have “whitewashed” their conscience. If we look attentively, we learn that Sarah and Edward still have somehow the involuntary ‘potential to kill,’ as, by analogy, the neoliberal, overconfident tradition of thought they represent may still hinder society’s progress. One of Edward’s comments is that “everyone has…stuck a fork in someone’s eye or dynamited a perfectly good shed” (113); and Sarah gives Tassie a poisonous, unlabelled bulb tapenade for the garden to preserve in the freezer but Murph almost dies after accidentally eating it. Not only, then, does the past haunt the present in ruthless, revengeful forms, but a recurring “structure of disaster” cages the characters in the novel, curbing any utopian potential they may have when trying to redesign their future.
<12> The second narrative thread is more openly connected to 9/11 and its destabilizing effects on the characters’ cultural and emotive perceptions. It tells of the relationship between Tassie and Reynaldo, a fascinating mixed-race student she meets in her Sufism class. All the stories in A Gate at the Stairs are tales of forgetfulness and superficiality against which destiny retaliates. However, compared to the other characters, Tassie is quite mature and dependable for her age, a trait that Sarah grasps right away. Tassie has a keen inclination to factual and psychological analysis and is able to show self-confidence even when she does not actually have it. Interestingly, though, there is a linguistic discrepancy between her introspective ruminations and her conversational style. What she thinks, she seldom translates verbally. While her thoughts are fraught with witty observations (“Bonnie was not bonnie…why would she care about the rhetorical mockery of her name?” [88]) and with erudite references (“I made my way through The Critique of Pure Reason. Some days grew so bland and barren, I found myself perusing Horace…” [64]), her interpersonal dialogue is laconic, scant (“‘Sounds good.’ It was the midwestern girl reply to everything.” [40]). Amplifying the first person narration, Moore grafts her cultivated language and experience upon the psyche of a blooming female adolescent, making the literary creation of Tassie sound at times hypertrophied and too conceited. The author conflates herself with the character-narrator to a point that we firmly rely on Tassie to understand all the events in the novel: Tassie is reliable (a reliable narrator, for once!) and goes unquestioned. While this literary expedient gets annoying at times – a swarming, adult mind contrasting with juvenile turns of phrases – it also presents a steady female identity wrestling with her socially limited skills.
<13> Within a few months, Tassie overcomes this double side of herself in her story with Reynaldo. She is in love with him head over heels. She takes Mary-Emma to his house and he enjoys playing with the toddler, proving “attentive and appreciative” (168). He is an intelligent and reserved youth who never lets his feelings shine through. “As a brown man” who ran a delivery business in New York immediately after 9/11 (192), Reynaldo was constantly checked and searched for by the police, with the result that deliveries were often getting delayed and his business fell apart. Writing about Tassie’s encounters with Reynaldo, Moore disseminates bits of information that only later, together with Tassie, we will realize were preliminary signs of another “disaster.” Reynaldo says he is Brazilian but knows almost no Portuguese. He teaches Tassie words that she will learn “much later it was actually Spanish with some Italian thrown in” (165). She likes his “black-and-white scarf – a print [she] thought of as Middle Eastern, though it could have been a Navajo tablecloth, for all [she] knew” (167). Moreover, Reynaldo takes beautiful pictures of Mary-Emma until one day Tassie has one blown up for Sarah as a surprise gift. Trying to decipher Sarah’s consternation, Tassie notices that in the picture, “Mary-Emma was sitting on Reynaldo’s prayer rug. I hoped it looked like a yoga mat” (174). Sarah contradicts her liberal spirit by telling Tassie to avoid future meetings between Reynaldo and Mary-Emma, though it is unclear whether the prayer rug specifically struck her as a potential sign of suspicion and danger. If Tassie unconsciously realizes that Reynaldo may not be Brazilian, she refuses on a rational level to think through the cultural semiotics he displays, later on succumbing to her lack of attentiveness.
<14> Reynaldo is then the fascinating, shifty Other, whose historical specificity is dangerously overlooked by Tassie in times that would demand careful cultural reconstructions of alterity: on the contrary, Tassie is mesmerized by Reynaldo’s vague exotic nature and uncritically abandons herself to it until the truth boomerangs back on her. Interspersing this love-story with a superb dose of sarcasm, Moore has Tassie spray an aromatic oil called “Arabian Princess” that may turn her into “the mascot of Osama Bin Laden” (140). “As adorned for a costume party’s idea of a terrorist” (184), the naïve, oblivious girl from Dellacrosse (the other, vulnerable side of her “adult” mind) wears an Egyptian necklace and a “muslin headscarf,” which Reynaldo “thought I’d called…‘Muslim’ rather than ‘muslin’” (193-94). All these descriptions indicate that Arab symbols and names are already circulating and transforming popular discourse and taste after only a few months from 9/11. In Tassie’s portrayal as a mindless lover, Moore shows that the tragedy of 9/11 may easily become a funny aesthetic repository of exotic images that we commodify in our everyday activities. While these frivolous elements have a comic effect in the novel, they are also ominous since they imply a one-way cultural appropriation rather than a thorough reciprocal dialogue. When Reynaldo tells Tassie that he is moving to London because he is part of an “Islamic charity for Afghan children”– and reassures her that he is not “part of a cell” (204), Tassie gets a sudden bath of reality. Out of the blue, in the space of two pages, she articulates with clarity what she had up to then disregarded, i.e. that Reynaldo may be a terrorist for all she knows.
<15> Their farewell is a snip-snap dialogue: “It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.” “Thank you, holy warrior, for the Islamofascist lecture.” “As Muhammad said, we do not know God as we should” (206). Enraged and shocked, Tassie mocks and provokes Reynaldo at the same time trying to reason with him: “How about a kinder, gentler jihad?” “One must listen to God.” “Well, God should speak up. He mumbles.” Calmly, Reynaldo says, “Mankind is the source of all suffering.” And Tassie replies, “‘And the source of all God.’ I had crossed a line” (207). The dialogue is trenchant and definitive. As hinted above, Tassie loses Reynaldo but this “disaster” makes her emerge as a clever, vital young woman who acknowledges her thoughtlessness and learns to defend her own cultural position with balance and respect. In the epistemological framework of the novel, Tassie may represent the burgeoning Democratic intelligentsia that could authentically pursue the “post-racial” ideal (embodied by Obama in a few years to come) evoked by Sarah’s friends, who on the contrary do not sound clear, nor authoritative enough in their political discussions of 9/11. On the other hand, the elusive Reynaldo throws a cultural challenge to the readers and characters in the novel, as he cannot be deciphered (while Moore implies he should be) but only loved and feared at this historical juncture.
<16> Genuinely in love with Reynaldo, the half-Jewish Tassie tries to see the man beyond the “brown” Arab jihadist but, unfortunately, “[l]ocating the living him would be like finding a miner in a collapsed mine” once he would be gone (208). Most of all, Tassie has to endure abandonment for her naïveté – another “chicken that comes home to roost.” The trope of “revengeful disaster” connected to 9/11 applies to the sentimental sphere, as well. Had Tassie been outside the aforementioned “bubble” we are all living in, she could have saved herself some suffering, making more informed choices. She learns that to pay full attention to the Other is a rule of life, especially in a world where no “one, it seemed, was who they said they were” (226). Tassie’s story with Reynaldo coagulates post-9/11 fears of the Other and it points at the necessity of cultural understanding before mere romance, even though in 2002 times are not yet ripe for a fruitful intercultural “marriage.” Moore suggests that, at the time of the story, the Other can only be conceived as either exotic, or potentially lethal, but should an authentic, deep cultural communication be lacking in future inter-ethnic relationships, our own survival may be jeopardized. While the author “pardons” Tassie, she also presents her story with Reynaldo as a multi-faceted cautionary tale.
<17> Even more painfully than with her Arab lover, Tassie learns the importance of “listening” within the closing thread of the novel, which concerns her brother Robert’s choice of joining the army at the outbreak of the Afghanistan war (October 2001). Her overlooking his fragility and his passive choice of giving in to the military configure here a double revenge pattern, which confirms that 9/11 and its implications are not taken seriously enough in the peripheral America that Moore portrays. At the beginning of the novel, in his last year of school, Robert is bored and without a clear life perspective. During the 2001 Christmas holidays, he makes clear to Tassie that he is not eager to take up his father’s agricultural business and that Dellacrosse offers no interesting profession. Therefore, Robert has let himself be seduced by an army recruiter at school and he now thinks that joining the military would be a safe choice because “it’s peacetime. [He is] not going to get killed or nothing” (57). Tassie does not misread the political state of affairs as he does:
“‘But it’s not really peacetime. There’s Afghanistan,’ I said. These faraway countries that had intruded on our consciousness seemed odd to me. It seemed one thing sixty years ago to … fight for France, a country we had heard of, but what did it mean now to fight in or at—there was no preposition…for?—a place like Afghanistan?” (58)This play of prepositions signals the profound bewilderment that reigns among common people about the US role in a world that suddenly exists after 9/11, but that no one can bring into focus. Common people’s language is deficient and confused against an oversimplified political rhetoric that has conveniently split the world into “they” and “us.” Challenging in fact the rhetorical expression “enduring freedom” (“Shouldn’t freedom just be free?” [59]), Tassie is a little more versed than Robert but she still neglects his confusion and ignorance. Then, the two of them walk away through the snowy prairies and the icy roads of their hometown, aimlessly tossing stones in the cold stream. Again, this scene sounds like the prodrome of a disaster. While Tassie ponders over the “intrusion” of 9/11 and the alienation it has generated in everyone’s life, her brother acts on his boredom, pretending to find a life goal in the orthodox and disciplined field of the armed forces.
<18> In this third story, Moore registers the standpoint of US youths in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, imagining a particular setting in suburban America where military recruiters exploit the “favorable” situation to draft ingenuous teenagers and where hypercritical college students (in Troy) fill up “the Intro to Islam course” (58). As it is happening in other world countries, joining the army becomes either a palliative professional solution before being a genuine patriotic act, or a possible matter of academic debate within a crowded multicultural course. With an almost ethnographic approach, Moore crystallizes the fundamental anti-militarism of younger US generations, who, in different styles and for different reasons, feel that war is something distant and alien, when not part of an “anti-ecological” inclination. For example, Tassie observes: “[Robert] had never been an enthusiastic hunter. How would he manage in the military?” (59).
<19> Once again, in Moore’s novelistic design, just when one thinks mindlessly or hubristically to be safe, destiny retaliates. In this case, whenever one believes the war to be alienating and alienated – since it encourages isolation and it cannot hurt because it is distant – its brutal, violent reality intrudes upon one’s own life. No one is isolated and every decision has ramified consequences. The day after his graduation in summer 2002, Robert leaves “for the ironically named Fort Bliss” (268) and comes back a few months later, his body’s parts rearranged and laid out in a coffin, together with a check for twelve thousand dollars. A routine land-mine sweep had killed him in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan – suddenly, a closer place. Tassie remembers their last good-bye at the bus station, noticing that Robert
was desperate for the knowledge and reasoning behind anything. I could see he felt shorthanded, underequipped, factually and otherwise. Just the night before he had said, “Afghanistan has provinces? Like Canada?” (266)The novel seems to imply that Robert’s “ignorance,” a baleful leitmotif for all the characters in the novel, has cost him his life. Moore tackles issues of responsibility and self-awareness and invites reflection on what it means to spread war in a global world that can only repay in the same way at the moment. Furthermore, Moore shows that the personal and the political are always interconnected, since a responsible, informed choice at a personal level may sanction, or obstruct, the course of larger policies and collective decisions. The US illusion of being unrelated to the world proves catastrophic, even for the last of the soldiers and even more after 9/11, when a sense of cultural alienation and invisible violence frustrates any form of educated and critical agency.
<20> In this tragedy, Tassie feels she is guilty. Many months earlier her brother had sent her an email asking for help with his decision to join the military and she had always postponed the answer, eventually forgetting about it. Mindlessness again appears as a life-changing “sin.” Busy at that time with unmasking the real life of Sarah, Tassie felt “she had become vague and unknowable to [herself] in guilt and inaction” (262). Earlier, when she had failed to “listen” to Reynaldo, she was the only one who ended up suffering. But now that she has disregarded Robert’s distress signals, death and collective bereavement overwhelmed all her beloved ones. With the wisdom of hindsight, Tassie understands that indifference must not dominate interpersonal relationships. She had spent all the summer wearing fake feather wings and running in front of her father’s thresher to scare the mice away from the mix. Feeling “like Icarus” (270), Tassie had secluded herself from the world in a surreal bucolic dream, until the news of Robert’s death high-jacked her self-centered flight. Now, unseen, she lies with him in the coffin for a while at the funeral, in a macabre reunion with the bodily presence of her brother she had previously denied.
<21> In A Gate at the Stairs, then, Moore imagines in retrospect a world only tangentially affected by the terroristic design and yet connoted (if not corroded) by it. Whether symbolic or real, gates are everywhere in the novel: at Mary-Emma’s bedroom door, within Troy’s mixed community, in the family property in Dellacrosse, in Murph’s lyrics. Often, though, they are broken, as if they were just waiting for some flight of stairs to materialize and show a way out of perplexity. Through her sarcasm, Moore then provokes her reader into a less passive stance towards the post-9/11 world, inviting responsibility, compassion and humility in dealing with Otherness, or else a revengeful fate may underpin the narratives ahead of us. Implying through her stories that exceptionalism itself is a dangerous fantasy, Moore captures how 9/11 surreptitiously transforms in piercing ways the lives of common people who think to be immune from history.
Works Cited
Kelly, Alison. Understanding Lorrie Moore. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
Moore, Lorrie. A Gate at the Stairs. New York: Random House, 2009.
Pneuman, Angela. Interview with Lorrie Moore. Believer. 3.8 (October 2005). Web. 16 July 2010.
Interview with Lorrie Moore. Madison Review. 23.2 (2002). Qtd. in Kelly, Alison. Understanding Lorrie Moore. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 143.
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