A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

March 1, 2015
For his first work of fiction in more than a decade, Gates explores-though maybe the better term is strip-mines-well-off souls hitting the skids thanks to divorce, illness, self-medication, or some combination thereof.Gates knows his preferred theme, and the dozen stories here stick to it. The opening novella, Banishment, is narrated by a New York journalist who falls for a semifamous architect 30 years her elder. Speaking in a sassy, world-wise, but increasingly weary tone, she catalogs her creative decline (her dream of using her kept-woman status to write essays ends with her whiling away days smoking weed), her husband's failing health, and an emotional decision that crashes the house of cards. In that story, Gates (The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1999, etc.) displays a knack for burrowing into the lives of affluent, culturally savvy types. But though Gates tinkers with perspective and setting in the remaining stories, their effect is less expansive and ultimately repetitive. "Alcorian A-1949" is narrated by a hard-drinking composer turned cynical about his "oh-so-personal vision." "George Lassos Moon" follows a theater critic with a drug habit, thrust back into the life of a protective aunt after a drunk-driving arrest. An English professor in "Monsalvat" is maintaining a speed habit while minding her aging poet father. And so on, and so on. Sometimes these stories strain credulity to attain their effect of domestic collapse, never worse than the moment when a doctor's druggy children take revenge on his new wife in "A Secret Station" by taking a chainsaw to the Thanksgiving turkey. Gates is a graceful and penetrating writer about people who are stuck in a rut. But the rhythms and emotional temperature of these stories have a stubborn sameness of their own. A well-turned but overly familiar sequence of domestic dramas.

April 1, 2015

The unnamed narrator of the novella, "Banishment," does Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (which she references) one better--none of the major characters here is named. She marries early, leaves husband for husband-to-be (considerably older once-famous architect), later leaves him for his daughter, who eventually leaves her. That's plot, but this work is not plot- but character-driven. The narrator's ruminations about self and sex (lots of that) are alluring, while hints about the conclusion keep the reader going. Toward the end, she says: "I don't know what all of this is supposed to add up to: it seems to be about damaged and selfish people." Yep. The novella is good, but the stories are better, well-paced excursions into lives beset with problems. Strange situations abound. In "The Curse of the Davenports" the teenage son of an estranged couple takes in and takes off with a bad-home-damaged 14-year-old, vexing the couple and causing them to become reconnected, however briefly. The narrator of the title story faces a monumental decision when longtime in-and-out friend and fellow bluegrass-picker decides he wants to die at Paul's quiet country home. He decides right--perhaps thanks to the eponymous "hand." VERDICT For those who like quiet, thoughtful, referential short fictions.--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
Gates' (The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1999) first book in 15 years finds the Guggenheim Fellow and former Newsweek writer in familiar territory. As in his previous novels and stories, the novella and 11 tales that comprise this collection depict writers, critics, musicians, actors, and poets reluctantly resorting to drugs, alcohol, and isolation to dull familial anguish and sexual frustration. Many of these characters are aging; most are good at their art but have failed at marriage, parenthood, or work. At the heart of most stories lies a housea place where lovers hide away, the world-weary nurse their wounds, and the disaffected attempt to start new lives. In the book's archetypal opener (the novella), a writer chronicles her second marriage, to a wry and successful architect 30 years her senior, and her subsequent lapse into complacency, pot smoking, and deep-seeded desires. While Gates may have exhausted his subject matter years ago, he proves himself as eloquent, funny, and cynical as ever, a master prose stylist at the top of his form.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)