The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories

I can see why this author was a finalist for the Pulitzer. This book of short stories is concise and heartfelt, without ever drifting into sappy or overly dramatic. The characters are believable, but not always likable. Not a dud in the bunch. Cannot recommend highly enough.

The title for this book draws from a work by Cotton Mather, and it refers to the devils that nip at our inner lives. Those forces play out in the lives of the characters in these ten short stories. Most are set in upstate New York or in some part of rural New England. In most cases, the subjects are people who share a common set of geographies and perspectives. These are people who populated big cities like New York and Boston but now make their home in a smaller place. In this book, many "Wonders" haunt their lives. Often, it seems like the troubles are of their own doing. There is the aging if committed social activist who sees conspiracies, but cannot see that he is not paying attention to his wife and the life that they share. There is the gay film producer who dabbles in a study of pornography, and must confront what it reveals about his own relationship. There is the young woman who flirts with disastrous affairs with men and drugs. It is not just people falling apart at the seams. There are some stories that project hope, too. Still, Gates is not out to extol the virtues of humanity so much as he is willing to point out the difficult tightrope that many people walk, balancing their desires and temptations against the outside world. Most of his characters are losing their way. Gates has a funny habit of interjecting literature and books into the lives of his subjects, too. For example, one character is prone to reading too much Ezra Pound. The house guest who must satisfy his yearning for Hazlitt. Another who acknowledges his growing age by realizing that never again will he read Timon of Athens. Another, uncertain of his place in society, who can take solace in knowing that he does well to read his nephew The Runaway Bunny at bedtime. Above all else, the author has an incredible gift for writing dialogue. He writes the way people speak, warts and all. I treasured these stories. I think the insight that we are often our own worst enemies is an excellent basis for writing. I feel like I have met versions of many of these people.

A number of the other reviewers of this collection have focused on the sensibilities of Gates in terms of place (New York--the northeastern U.S.) and community (middle class, at least middle-aged, white people). Variations on a theme, to continue the musical metaphor, can be boring for some people. In many cases he made me care about his characters. He made me like them, empathize with them, feel angry at them. In no case did I want to change places with any of them--their lives are too much like all our lives. Nor did I ever despise any of them, probably for the same reason. The gay protagonist in "Star Baby" struggles with a sexuality he clearly did not choose and almost unconsciously falls in platonic, paternal love with the child of his crazed sister. The elderly narrator in "Vigil" is an island of sanity in a sea of family dysfunction. As such, he is held in contempt for his normality and his tolerance of the behavior of his loved ones. He is unbelievably naive and good hearted for one of his age, and I admire him for it. (Perhaps it is not so much naivete as a deliberate choice to see the best in people). I would refer anyone accusing Gates of only protraying cynicism in his stories to this character. While these stories might not be for everyone, Gates is a real talent and unusually gifted at character exposition.

This is the best collection of stories I've read this year, hands down and I've read quite a few. The characters, dialogue and stories are gripping, believeable, horrific and funny--most of the time, all of those things at once. I liked some of the stories more than others but I liked them all, particulary "Vigil" and the title story. Gates' characters are the type who've read Raymond Carver yet Carver's characters would never come near a David Gates book--much less any book. Anyway, this guy's the real deal and a pleasure to read. I hope he takes a good long time between this and the next thing he writes so that he keeps the level of quality that's in these stories in everything else he does. They're excellent.

An elderly Wasp stroke victim listens in as his speech turns to a dissonant, Steinian kind of music. A heartfelt letter to a pregnant daughter becomes a sort of Bartok concerto in words, and even a simple physical act, like licking the envelope, "requires analytical thought." "The Mail Lady," the climactic story in David Gates' collection, might have you leaning forward in awe and excitement: Gates works toward a parable of faith that might do a master like Flannery O'Connor proud. He starts with a surge, he seems to fumble in rendering the protagonist's devoutness, then startles with the revelation of an unprepared-for cruelty toward his daughter, and takes flight in the final passages. "The Mail Lady" fairly sings with mastery. I'd say it's the kind of story that could be taught as an example of the form at its perfectest, but that doesn't do the story justice; it has more unpredictability and ungoverned life than that. It leaves Cheever-Updike territory and finally rises to an altitude of grace comparable to a harrowing Bach cantata of fear and faith."Saturn," the penultimate story, is another stunner--a picture of a half-whipsmart, half-unformed woman's grope for happiness in a materially content but smothering marriage to a monomaniac. The subject matter seems twice-ironed, but the observation is crisp, newborn. It seems so honestly arrived-at all quibbles disappear.Elsewhere, there's a noticeable paucity of language that can make a story feel more like an outline or a vivid character sketch than an organic creature. Gates writes for Newsweek, and the accessible, cut-to-the-chase prose of magazine writing seems deeply ingrained. And there are moments that suggest an inaccurate, less acute David Leavitt--especially in a story about an aging gay academic who discovers a secret about his younger beloved that gives the word contrived a fresh coat of paint.Gates may be the reigning grandmaster at the depiction of women's dissatisfaction with malfunctioning, attention-crazed men--stories operating under that premise tend to land right on target. But if only for the last two stories alone, Gates deserves mention as a future giant of his trade--and an unusually noble reminder of the moral fundament of writing and reading fiction.

Halfway done, about to go gobble the rest. These stories are purely great. The author is everywhere but nowhere, as it should be. When I start one I'm pulled in immediately from the momentum generated by the one before it -- Gates's voice is somehow resonantly consistent; the narrators are all the same character in a way, gay or straight, male or female, but this isn't a weakness, it's... something entirely else, to do with Gates's moral vision or something. Mordant, taut, touching, fierce, wacky, human stories. He's one of the three writers whose new books I buy immediately in hardcover and read then and there. (The other two aren't as good as he is, or so it seems to me at the moment, reading this)