The Wonders of the Invisible World

The author of the highly acclaimed novels Jernigan (Pulitzer Prize Finalist) and Preston Falls (National Book Critics Cirlce Award Finalist) offers up a mordantly funny collection of short stories about the faulty bargains we make with ourselves to continure the high-wire act of living meaningful lives in late twentieth-century America.

Populated by highly educated men and women in combat with one another, with substance abuse, and above all with their own relentless self-awareness, the stories in The Wonders of the Invisible World take place in and around New York City, and put urbanism into uneasy conflict with a fleeting dream of rural happiness.  Written with style and ferocious black humor, they confirm David Gates as one of the best-and funniest-writers of our time.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Amazon.com ReviewDavid 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

From Library JournalThe hard lesson learned by the characters in these smart, sometimes harrowing stories is that intelligence and sophistication are no protection against making a mess of your life. Newsweek staffer Gates (Preston Falls, LJ 12/97) creates bright, self-aware protagonistsAtoo educated in many cases for the circumstances in which they find themselvesAwho battle their personal demons with little more than a finely honed sense of irony. The title story concerns a divorced college dean who risks losing his student lover as he has lost his family. "Star Baby" is about a gay New Yorker who discovers an unexpected side of himself when he returns home to care for his drug-addicted sister's young son. Gates deftly mixes compassion and sarcasm throughout. For all public libraries.ALawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.