The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories
DAVID GATES
|
|
10 reviews (1999) (272p)Visit this book's Amazon.com page >>
| Book Description |
| In these stories, the author of Jernigan (runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize) and Preston Falls (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) illuminates with unflinching vision and hard-earned compassion a great variety of lives: men and women, young and old, in thrall to--or in flight from--jobs less creative than the echoing past had promised, as their parents, siblings or children die, implode or (perhaps just as bad) flourish. Gates's people know their Hopper, Huysmans and Haggard, their Beckett, Bartoli and Billie Holiday, more confidently than they know their families, friends and lovers. Yet they're terrifyingly self-aware, and refuse to go gently--even when they're going nowhere fast. The author the New York Times calls "a novelist of the very first order" now stakes a similar claim as a writer My first thought of the day is: And we are supposedly good people. (from "Beating") Moral support: a weird expression. Was the assumption that people's morals needed shoring up in time of stress? Or was it moral of you to lend support? ("The Crazy Thought") But it's not his baby, of course, nor mine. The baby is its own baby. I think of it as a girl, because the idea of a tiny man inside me is, is, is what? Repulsive, I was going to say . . . ("The Bad Thing") If anything is strange, it's her husband's refusing to get rid of his dead mother's wheelchair. ("Saturn") What you don't do is get into porn on the Internet. You don't get a cat. You could possibly get a dog, but not a small dog. ("Star Baby") Out Main Street we flew and onto Massachusetts Avenue, and the people on the sidewalks seemed to pass each other in comradely fashion, like the angels in Jacob's dream--a thing I hadn't thought about since I was a |
| Amazon.com Review |
| David Gates writes practically perfect American stories. Perfect, first of all, in their staid adherence to American short-story tradition. There will be no rioting in the cafés over his first collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World, with its glimpses of characters daunted by love. Here are creatures we know well: Manhattan quasi professionals taking their lumps; urbane fortysomethings trying out small-town life. It's all Updikean adultery, Cheeveresque drinking, some drugs, a life-altering accident or two. But Gates's stories step beyond being perfect examples of their form to become something fresh, compassionate, and witty. He has an astonishing handle on the way people talk, not just to each other, but to themselves. In the title story, a husband remembers the day his wife left him: "She appeared holding a tall glass in each hand as if she were--forget it, no stupid similes. She was a vision. A vision of herself." In "Beating," a Jewish woman is fed up with her Leftist, activist husband, who owns Pound's collected works. "I fantasize sometimes about making a big stink and demanding that he at least put Ezra Pound away where I won't have to see it every day of my life. I'd be like, Hey hey, ho ho, Ezra Pound has got to go." This kind of attention to the goofy music of interior dialogue is normally found in comic fiction. But Gates is concerned, too, with the little failures of language, and so the failures of relationships. His territory is not comedy, it's the tragedy of failed optimism. In this way, too, he is a perfectly American writer. --Claire Dederer |
| Other Award Winning Books by David Gates |
|
|
37 reviews (2015) (336p)
|
|
|
|
| David Gates Award Stats |
|
| *Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award |
