Book of the Week

How is it that no one had co-opted the title “Hell Is Other Parents” before? When Sartre said “Hell is other people,” he must have had at least one snippy playground mom in mind (so what if he didn’t have rug rats; there’s always a snippy playground mom at parks, even in Paris, waiting to give anyone the slightest bit imperfect her gimlet eye).

Lorrie Moore, whose mastery of the short story has made her one of contemporary literature’s most-watched writers, is back with her first novel in 15 years. “A Gate at the Stairs” is a dark yet humorous examination of what it’s like to come of age in a post-9/11 world.

Moore’s protagonist Tassie Keltjin grows up and goes to university in the Midwest, but we never find out precisely where, which is one of the larger ambiguities that seems meant to make her an Everywoman. On the other hand, Tassie is a very specific young woman: Her mother is Jewish (an ethnicity that seems limited to referring to Tassie as “Tassalah” and calling the family Christmas tree a “Hanukkah bush”), her father is a gentleman farmer famed for his heirloom potatoes (including a variety he smuggled back from Sweden), and Tassie is no stereotypical blonde, milkfed cheerleader.

Quentin is a high-school geek whose comfort reading is a five-novel children’s series called Fillory and Further by the early-twentieth-century English author Christopher Plover. In those books, the Chatwin children find their way into an enchanted land called Fillory by means of a grandfather clock in the house to which they’ve been exiled because of family matters. 

Critics often overlook the very first thing any reader learns about a book: Its title. Yet anyone in the industry can tell you that titles are important – carefully chosen, even agonized over, during the publishing process.

Why have so many reviews completely overlooked the title of Monica Ali’s new novel, “In the Kitchen?” Yes, a kitchen is the book’s setting – that of the Imperial Hotel in London, a fictional institution beautifully embodying the halfway-house state of so many once-grand European hotels (a lobby renovated with anonymous modern fittings, “silk” flowers on the restaurant tables). Protagonist Gabriel (Gabe) Lightfoot is the executive chef at the Imperial, so he spends a great deal of time in the kitchen.