In a recent essay for the Wall Street Journal titled "Good Novels Don't Have to Be Hard Work," Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman announced the death of the literary novel.The plotless meandering of high-minded fiction—inspired, Grossman believes, by modernists like Joyce, Hemingway, Woolf, and Pound—is giving way to writers like Neil Gaiman, who "are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance." Some dunderhead is always declaring the death of some literary form, of course, but when the book critic of one of the largest newsweeklies in America does it, the claim carries a bit more weight.

Here's the thing, though: Not a whole lot happens in Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. There are no car chases or rampant vampirism, and if any bosoms heave over the course of the book, they remain, thankfully, undescribed. It is not a novel of plot. This story—a young farmer's daughter named Tassie leaves home to attend college and winds up taking a job as a nanny for an upscale couple who has just adopted a mixed-race child—is not the kind of story that Grossman champions. And yet it's one of the best novels of the year.

Moore is best known for her short stories, and for good reason: Birds of America has the distinction of being one of the only flawless story collections from the 20th century not written by John Updike. Her two previous novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, were slight but beautifully crafted things, more like very long short stories. But Gate has both the heft and the ornate uselessness of a novel.

Moore is finally unafraid to linger in the corridors of her story and see what she finds there. Early in the novel, Tassie accompanies her employer Sarah on an expedition to meet with a pregnant woman who is considering giving Sarah and her husband her child. After introductions, they sit in a booth and "things moved with swiftness and awkwardness both, like something simultaneously strong and broken." Tassie's eye turns to the expectant mother's probation officer, "his blue jacket still on, his bottomless Diet Coke stacked with ice. A going-to-seed hunk in a windbreaker; the world seemed full of them."

Tassie is from hardy Midwestern stock—she attends school in a college town not that different from Madison, where Moore teaches English at the University of Wisconsin—and the book thrums with that Midwestern kind of indiscriminating, relentless good cheer in the face of even the most bleak and lonely winter. Even her darkest observations gleam with a certain optimism:

Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

The book's strongest and weakest points fall within the realm of social commentary. Sarah forms a support group for adoptive parents of mixed-race children, and as Tassie watches the children upstairs, she listens to the disembodied voices of the hilariously clueless parents, and they form a kind of idiotic Greek chorus for Tassie's more nuanced observations about ethnic identity in the snow-blind Midwest. They bicker over busing and military recruitment of minorities and the meaning and derivation of the term race card—someone thinks it's from the O. J. trial—and one unidentified parent continually chirps, "Don't get me started about Islam!"

Islam also provides the weakest element of the novel, as Tassie falls in love with a Muslim student from Brazil who merely falls in bed with her. Several scenes, especially a climactic argument between the two lovers, feel almost too detached, as though Tassie and her boyfriend are arguing across the distance between two different novels. As a stylistic choice, it makes sense—in many ways, the relationship illustrates the cultural and racial distances that the rest of the characters in Gate so fastidiously ignore—but narratively, it feels unsatisfying, a missed opportunity.

Those missteps are few and far between in Gate. Tassie's voice is so warm and so welcoming (even if it's heard through the kind of Wisconsonian gritted-teeth smile that denounces your intrusion even as you are welcomed into the home for a plate of cookies and a glass of milk) that it lulls the reader. We wander from observations of gnarled potatoes to half-assed explorations of Sufism to a description of one of Glenn Gould's Bach suites that just as easily describes the novel itself: "The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead... it asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it."

The rough intrusion of a plot here—a kidnapping, say?—would only make this book into something smaller, weaker, and much less melodic. This is a book that proves Grossman wrong.