Gate at the Top of the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Set just after 9/11, Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown Iowa girl weathering a clumsy college year and finds a job as a nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent adventures in prospective motherhood involve a pregnant girl with scarcely a tooth in her head and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend—both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less naïve Tassie.

I tried to read this and about half-way through just didn't care about finishing it. It was due back to the library so just returned it. It just felt like it was going nowhere and while some of the observations were funny it wasn't enough to engage me.