Lorrie Moore, you have my heart.

Can we talk about Lorrie Moore for a second?

I've devoured most of her short story collections (try Like Life to start) and was so incredibly and nerdishly excited when she published a novel late last year, A Gate At The Stairs. It finally came in at the library for me, and I've spent the last couple of days wishing I could just unplug the phone, hunker down, and do nothing but read it. It's the story of the ludicrously named college student Tassie Keltijn (this name alone nearly threw me off but don't let it get to you, seriously), who takes a nanny job for a couple in the process of adopting. This incredibly simple premise spirals out into a really remarkable universe of troubled characters, social tension, and amazingly hilarious turns of phrase. Moore is one of those writers whose command of the structure of a sentence is just so perfect, so poetic and so clear, that you find yourself reading bits over and over again. A Gate At The Stairs is part post-9/11 satire, part bildungsroman (how long have I been waiting to use THAT word?), part strange, dark, psychological study. Okay okay, it drags a little at some points, but the dizzying linguistic highs totally compensate for the occasional forays into over the top socio-cultural commentary.

So just so I can prove it, here's the best passage in the book, between Sarah, Tassie's boss and a new adoptive mother, and Tassie. The first part is Sarah's reminiscence of a favourite food:

'"When I was little Dannon made this delicious prune yogurt that came in a waxy brown eight-ounce container. Well, now they don't make any of those things. Completely gone. Although I was in Paris last year and found some there."

'I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science. I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seem to be saying, "Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!" '

My god, the woman is a genius.