Ruth, the protagonist, is a stock Moore character: her husband, Terence, is a serial cheater, and though she has already had one lung removed for cancer and undergone chemotherapy, she still smokes. Of course, they never discuss anything substantative, and Ruth lingers on in unhappy silence. In an attempt at pedantic word usage, Moore refers to a keloidal scar as a “ketoidal track.” The plot includes a couple of absurdities that I assume are supposed to be entertaining. An unknown fifteen-year-old boy named Tod illegally occupies Ruth’s attic unbeknownst to her – even though she and Terence have heard him clomping around for days. There is a burglar named Noel who breaks into people’s homes while they’re in bed, makes them sing him songs, and transcribes the words before robbing them. In the denouement, Ruth, who has been practicing shooting in order to kill unwanted crows in the yard, shoots and kills Noel. Finally Ruth runs from the house barefoot, and, as in countless Lorrie Moore stories, there is a rush of evocative language that sympathetically represents what might simply be called clinical depression.

When I say that Moore’s work has declined in quality, it’s because she was writing the same sorts of things twenty years ago and has become formulaic. Without reading it, I presume the failure of “A Gate at the Stairs” would be starker, with these unsatisfactory elements jumbled into a full-length novel that wasn’t edited properly. I agree with Dan Green that her language can still be beautiful, but have hoped that by now she would be able to write something better: a book that comes to grips with more than a few artificially constructed vicissitudes of life, that doesn’t rely on overwrought emotional set pieces, and that appeals to mature, educated adults.

I’ve written elsewhere that the early landing of a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin has led to a dearth of experience in a life that was uneventful to begin with. Some argue that struggling artists need their struggle assuaged. I don’t agree, and Lorrie Moore is a case in point.