Document Type
Article
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.
Repository Citation
Mansutti, Pamela. "The Chickens Have Come Home To Roost!' Post-9/11 Revengeful Narratives in Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–12. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/10