...[O]ften feels as though Mr. Gates were trying to challenge himself by writing from a multiplicity of viewpoints....[He] delineates his characters' predicaments with a pitch-perfect ear for their defensive humor and bitter wordplay and a coy knowledge of their undeveloped hearts....[E]ach tale is...nimbly crafted...
—New York Times
Along with writer Richard Ford, David Gates has become one of the premier chroniclers of an increasingly prominent condition: suburban malaise. Gates, a Newsweek staff writer who splits his time between New York City and the bucolic homesteads in Upstate New York, has a journalist's eye for the minutiae that differentiate one dysfunctional relationship from the next, and a perverse fascination with wrenching tidy, green-lawned lives apart. Gates is almost cynically focused on disastrous relationships: Divorce, separations, and not-quite-distanced break-ups are the norm in Gates' excellent short-story collection The Wonders Of The Invisible World. The neurosis of each character Gates creates is a mix of the modern and the mundane: A young gay man left in charge of his rehabbing sister's son worries that the kid might discover his hidden copy of a magazine called Fuckbuddies as much as he worries what will happen to his nephew when his sister returns. A pregnant wife absentmindedly imbibes most of a bottle of booze, only to have her furtive attempts to replace the lost liquor lead to a potentially insurmountable low point in her marriage. A man waits anxiously for his wife to recover from a car accident, if only to ask her whether she's having an affair. Gates perfectly documents the psychological car wreck of lives moving apart too fast to stop while deftly switching his voice and vantage from housewife to grandfather to gay filmmaker with the skill of a method actor. One remarkable facet of Gates' talents is his habit of leaving the storylines hanging: Just as his characters often speak and think in fragments, so do his portraits often end at crucial junctures, thus thwarting any chance at closure. Wounds heal but scars remain, like ellipses passively continuing a story that can only end in death.
&#; The Onion's, A.V. Club
There are “eight million stories in the Naked City,” according to a character in one of Gates’ ten stories. Many of these stories are about New Yorkers, most messing up relationships, some blaming the city’s drugs and sex, poverty or wealth. Gates’ thirty-something characters, often would-be artists, retreat to the invisible world of places like Albany or small-town Vermont. The “wonders” several find there are small: A gay man discovers that his eight-year-old nephew prefers him to the child’s mother, a male stroke victim is pulled from the mud by a female letter carrier he dislikes. Most of the characters, though, can’t escape their failures at coupling or parenting and their New York habits of ironic detachment and witty complaint.
The country, says one narrator, is “coarse,” the city “harsh.” Gates is frequently both, building stories out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-type dialogue—bitter husbands and wives, disappointed fathers and children gouging away at each other.
Because their resentments are frequently similar and because the stories are almost all first-person narratives, Wonders is best read a story a week. That way, one can tolerate the pervasive unhappiness and appreciate how Gates juggles two American dualisms that go back to Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau: salvation or damnation, nature or civilization.
Examined at sufficient distance, this collection is like a mobile, its figures suspended at different heights, each moving differently as one is touched. The reader just has to accept that many of the figures have nooses around their necks.
In a world obsessed with self-help, personal growth, and happy endings,
David Gates's stories are realistically, refreshingly bleak...
&151;New York Magazine
You might want to think twice before inviting David Gates into your life -- he's going to rifle through your medicine cabinet, pop the tape into your VCR, even paw through the top drawer where you cache your weed, and tell everything he knows. He's the kind of writer who gets between his characters and their favorite cereal (Count Chocula). Minutiae are his prima materia.
But the sadness and vacancy they describe is anything but small-scale. In his affecting short-story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World, Gates, the author of the dark, alcohol-soaked suburban tragedies Jernigan and Preston Falls, slyly captures the brooding disconnect of an overeducated, underoccupied American middle class. He builds his characters via crushingly accurate details: their bedside massage oil from the Gap, Tropicana HomeStyle O.J., "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets. For the most part, they are couples with two homes but barely one happiness between them. Plot isn't exactly the point. It's his characters' condition -- playful and despairing at precisely the same time -- that makes them so transfixing.
What Gates is best at (and there's much to admire) is that mix of levity and rawness. In "The Intruder," a bitchy young man named James moves in with Finn, an older, gay documentary filmmaker, only to find himself startled at the brutality of Finn's most famous work, a movie about children's games: "'This is amazing,' James said. 'How did you get this to be so scary?' Finn dropped into his Zen pedagogical manner. 'Just by looking at it.'"
It's a thin cover for Gates' own method. But it's James' rejoinder that truly distills what makes Gates such a captivating storyteller. "James looked back at the frozen image. 'I wonder how you look at me,' he said. 'I'd like to be looked at with kindness.'" Which is to say: Don't worry about the Count Chocula. As closely as Gates shadows his characters, he's as forgiving as they come.
Often, as in "The Bad Thing" or "The Crazy Thought," the central occupation of the characters is evasion -- how not to talk about their marriage, their affection for the liquor cabinet, the "stupid affairs" they can't seem to shake. This aspect of his stories can give them a sense of indirection, so be prepared for some goofy pre-dinner pot smoking ("Saturn") and ramblings about the background music in restaurants ("Wonders of the Invisible World"). As in the novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, pop culture is usually the characters' only consolation. When the young day-care worker in "Beating" can't keep her husband sober enough for conversation, she rents Disney's Beauty and the Beast for the umpteenth time so that she can "really lose it when all the stuff in the castle goes back to being real."
In Gates' stories, those emotional crescendos, the real transformations, seem always to take place after the last page, if at all. The one real exception is "Star Baby," the collection's strongest and most touching piece. Billy, a 32-year-old gay man (Gates, for the record, is straight), returns to his hometown in Albany to care for his sister's young son Deke while she goes through detox. The story watches him fake his way into fatherhood, from trips to CVS for the kid's Halloween costume to Sunday sermons at the Methodist Church. "They've had pasta the last three nights. Deke would eat it definitely, and Billy doesn't care," Gates writes. "If they want variety, they can always get a different Paul Newman sauce."
Like most of Gates' creations, Billy has only a tenuous relationship to maturity. At the end, the pair drive toward Boston to clean his sister's apartment of drugs in preparation for her return. Deke impulsively opens the passenger-side door and threatens to leap onto the highway -- he doesn't want his mom back, he wants to be with Billy. Parenthood has ambushed his uncle, and all Gates' tiny details add up to one gripping recognition:
Billy's heart begins to slow down. He looks over at
Deke. The pale skin, through which a blue vein
shows at his temple. The soft hair that should've
been trimmed weeks ago. The ragged, scuffed
sneakers Billy's been meaning to replace. So much
need, and nobody else to help. He takes a deep
breath, lets it out. "Well?" he says. "I'm here, right?
I'm not going anywhere."
— Salon
Gates can be very funny, but he is not a satirist — he doesn't stand that far back from the lives he is considering....He's not a moralizer either, though his best stories are thick with moral implication....[He takes] seriously the idea that the youthful self, always difficult to relinquish in America, may be even tougher to shed when sex and drugs and rock-and-roll have so intensified it, and cool irony has provided it with such durable insulation.
— The New York Times Book Review
Gates packs his plots with lively details and inhabits a wide range of voices...the reader is intrigues rather than merely disgusted by these whiny, drunk, solipsistic people.
— Time Out NY
A strong first collection of ten stories about endangered or broken relationships, presented with impressive intensity by the Newsweek critic and novelist (Preston Falls, 1998, etc.).
