A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore
 The novel’s main character is Tassie Keltjin. At age 20, Keltjin is attending a major university identified only as the “Athens of the Midwest.” When the novel opens, she is looking for a job as a nanny. With no real childcare experience, she finds that the only mother willing to hire her is Sarah Brink. The hitch is that Sarah does not yet actually have a child. This doesn’t stop her from hiring Keltjin anyway. Soon Tassie finds herself embroiled in the Brink family's attempts to adopt a bi-racial child who eventually goes by the name “Emmie.” Now a college student and a nanny, Tassie starts a relationship with a man named Reynaldo whom she met in one of her classes. Reynaldo tells her that he is Brazilian. She thinks it's odd that when he purports to use Portuguese, he actually speaks Spanish. Later, Reynaldo ends the affair, informing her that he is suspected of terrorist activities and must disappear. In saying goodbye, Reynaldo tells her he is not actually Brazilian. When she asks where he is from, he answers "Hoboken, New Jersey." Though Reynaldo denies being part of a cell he says that "It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things" and then he quotes Muhammed. The Brink family's adoption proceedings go awry when it is discovered that the Brinks lost their biological child many years earlier in a bizarre highway accident. It emerges that Edward punished his son for insubordinate behavior by making him get out of the car at a highway rest stop. The boy then walked onto the highway where he was killed by an oncoming vehicle. Tassie mourns the loss of Emmie who is taken back into foster care. Within a few weeks, she is also mourning the death of her brother Robert. Having failed to succeed academically and be accepted to a good, four-year college, Robert enlists in the United States Army and attends boot camp at Fort Bliss. He is killed in Afghanistan almost immediately after boot camp. Tassie blames herself for his death when she discovers, amidst her email, an unread note from him asking for her advice on whether to join the army. The Keltjins are further devastated when the army issues multiple and conflicting accounts of how Robert died. Tassie spends a few chapters of the novel recuperating from life’s slings and arrows at her parents’ small farm, but she returns to college the next year. The novel closes on a telephone call in which Sara Brink’s husband Edward tells Tassie that he and his wife have split up. He then invites Tassie to have dinner with him. Tassie addresses the reader directly, saying she declined to meet him even for a cup of coffee and the novel ends on the words, “I learned that much in college.” There are multiple theories about the meaning of the book’s title. Michael Gorra writes that it refers to the child safety gates that people put at the top of staircases to keep children from toppling down the stairs. Michiko Kakutani, on the other hand, believes the book’s title refers to a song Tassie wrote which includes the lyric “I’d climb up that staircase/past lions and bears,/but it’s locked/at the foot of the stairs.” However, there is also a gate at the front of the Brink house that takes on symbolic significance as Tassie first approaches the house. The gate is slightly off its hinges, and Tassie notes mentally “it should have communicated itself as something else: someone’s ill-disguised decrepitude, items not cared for properly but fixed repeatedly in a make-do fashion, needful things having gotten away from their caregiver.”