Gates to Nowhere

I'm still plugging away at A Gate at the Stairs, but it's getting increasingly more difficult. I've been fast-forwarding a lot through description that seems uninteresting and that I would describe as filler, although I don't think the writer had intended it to be filler. Maybe her audience is someone other than me. Must a "coming-of-age" story be for young people only? Urban twenty-somethings only?

There are a couple of plot threads started that seem to have been dropped--such as her boyfriend's actual nationality and goals. But they may end up being important later. But getting to that later is getting more and more tedious.

Ah, well. Remind me to read no more of Ms. Moore's books!

Middle Aged Mothers

I've moved on now to one of the "M" books in my collection, in this case, A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore. It's contemporary fiction about a young woman who works as a nanny for a professional couple who adopt a mixed race child. It started out kind of slow but has engaged my interest because the twists and turns are unexpected--always a good thing in a novel.

The book got some very good reviews and some awards as well. I'm not often swayed by such reports because they seem a little self-serving for the literary fiction crowd who seem to like a certain kind of story about the angst of modern life, especially among upper-middle-class characters. This one seems a little different from that, even though it starts out seeming the same. The writer has a good style--almost poetic with her figures of speech and turns of phrase.

We'll see how it turns out.