Through here

"Awesome," I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either "sucked" or was "awesome." We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

--from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I recently saw that a bookstore somewhere in America is running a campaign against "awesome." They have bumper stickers that ban "awesome." I think there are t-shirts. When I saw this I had just begun realizing how "awesome" had become my response for just about anything. (I'm having a baby. Oh, that's awesome! / See you later. Awesome! / I think that reading went well. It was awesome.) Where did it come from, this word, and how did it work its way into my every conversation? What do I say if I can't say "awesome"? I still don't know, but I'm trying to be more conscious of its use. So that the "awe" can return to the word, unless it's meant to become the equivalent of "cowabunga, dude" from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Didn't one of the turtles say "awesome" a lot, too? I should do some research on that.

But I can't say that I thought Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs was awesome from the beginning. Or, perhaps, even at the end. What I'll say is that I was impatient for the first half of the book, nodding in awe, yes, at the language--never a dull or unpoetic sentence!--but where was the plot? Why was I so in the head of Tassie Keltjin when I didn't know where she was going or why? Why, half-way through, was I looking on every page for patterns: stairs, race, names, "sounds good," brothers.

"OK," I said, not knowing what else to say. "Sounds good." It was the midwestern girl's reply to everything.

If I don't say "awesome" I'll likely say "sounds good." I believe I texted "sounds good" this morning, even. And I certainly perked up and nodded the several times that Lorrie Moore pinpoints the patterns in our language. As Luke and I walked our dogs today, I made a point to respond at certain points in our conversation with silence or a nod instead of those filler words. And though so much of this book is the thought behind the action--the thought is the response to the action, and therefore the action isn't necessarily the most important element of the book--it's the silences, the lack-of, that propels you. The questions that have no answer. This is the reason I finished the book in one three-hour sitting tonight. Because just after the halfway point I began to get it and I didn't want it to stop, or, the questions became more complicated and Tassie became both more engaged and more withdrawn.

And then the heartbreak. And then more. And the whole time reflecting the words back on the title. And the whole time seeing my family in Tassie's. And the whole time wondering why we do the things we do to each other. And thinking about women and what it means to love and what it means to lose what you love. (Because all of that is ever-present on my mind lately. I try to decide what to eat and all I can think about is love.)

And after it all, I believe this book is a writerly treasure, an artifact of word-envy for those of us who wish for the consistency of surprise in language that Moore seems to have at her fingertips. I believe that, for those of us who experienced 9/11 and all of its repercussions, even in our small towns where no act of terrorism was itself terrorism, and for whom our friends and our brothers were thrust into situations accusatory and deadly, this book will remain in our gut long after we have shut the covers and alphabetized it on our shelves.

9/11 was a beginning of a different way of life, of different lives, because we had to react to tragedy. How do you tell the real story of an event like that? You tell the after. So perhaps I can say that A Gate at the Stairs was brilliant. Certainly Lorrie Moore is genius.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story. But now I'd gone back to thinking, no, the wedding was the end. It was the end of the comedy. That's how you knew it was a comedy. The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.