Synopsis
Stories by the author of the acclaimed novel PRESTON FALLS, most of them about Gates's perennial antihero: a middle-aged, sardonic, witty loser who takes a peculiar pleasure in his bad behavior. A New York Times Notable Book in 1999.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1999-06-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 257 pages | | Height: | 8.8 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 17.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
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 writerof short fiction.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 aboy in Sunday school--moving up and down the ladder that reached from earth to heaven. They began to be surrounded by a pulsing radiance, and I thought I saw some of them passing right through others. It didn'tstrike me as out of the ordinary. ("The Mail Lady")
In this extraordinary first collection of stories by the critically acclaimed author of "Jernigan" and "Preston Falls, " the strikingly real landscapes are populated with terrifyingly self-aware figures who refuse to go anywhere gently.
Industry Reviews
"THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD often feels as though Gates were trying to challenge himself by writing from a multiplicity of viewpoints--young and old, straight and gay, male and female--all rendered with meticulous emotional detail and an astringent sense of the absurdities and self-indulgences of contemporary life....Though Gates' characters are less romantic than the people in Richard Yates' fiction, they share a similar sense of disappointment and a similar inclination to use alcohol as an escape. Smart, self-conscious and overly articulate, they spend their days measuring the disconnection between their dreams and the daily grind of their lives."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (07/06/1999)
"Each of the stories in this collection turns on the presence, more often the absence, and sometimes just the possibility, of a disinterested love; Gates writes of a generation that tries to act as if such a love were at least possible, but most of whom are too selfish, weak or fearful to give and receive it."
Washington Post Book World - James Hynes (08/08/1999)
"Gates can be very funny, but he is not a satirist--he doesn't stand that far back from the lives he is considering, and he never offers a glimpse of something else, a better way. He's not a moralizer either, thought his best stories are thick with moral implication....[M]ostly Gates is concerned with creating characters you haven't met in fiction before, getting just right the words they use to disengagedly engage their women and their friends and even their inner selves...."
New York Times Book Review - Gerald Marzorati (07/18/1999)
"Gates writes about real people, adrift in the amorphous sea of adulthood, battered by their own petty compromises, the inability to live up to their better selves....It's a tricky line for a writer to navigate, but it works-both because these individuals, even at their least appealing, are always interesting, and because Gates gets it: the fear, the misgivings, the low-grade existential anguish, all the contemporary conundrums that motivate his characters' lives....[I]n evoking his characters' failings..Gates is onto a way of making fiction that matters."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - David L. Ulin (08/08/1999)
"The characters in these stories are cynical and civilized and helplessly caught in their ways.....Gates's writing, with its quick intelligence, makes us understand [them]."
Hamby
"What we think but don't say, what we say but wish we hadn't, and what we do but can't explain and then go on to do again--these are the messy behavioral foundations of David Gates's uncompromising fiction. [In] his brave new collection of stories, THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, Gates has positioned himself as a new realist at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from the motivational mythologists whose talk-show-themed novels of self-discovery dominate bestseller lists."
New York - Walter Kirn (07/13/1999)
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
