About book The Wonders Of The Invisible World (2015)
I want to like this book. The quality of Gates’s writing is fantastic. These stories are very short, and the length of them is just about perfect. Gates builds characters swiftly, and the reader feels intimately aware immediately of what is happening. If you have read Raymond Carver and loved it, you will love David Gates. They write along similar lines and with the same attitude. They write about broken, everyday people, perhaps with slightly above-average intelligence and suspicious morals. The stories get into the grit of their neurotic and often wrecked lives. I don’t love the stories because they just seem to be absent of any hope. Those looking for redemption aren’t likely to find much here. In my opinion, there are 4 standout stories in the collection. The Bad Thing — This story was difficult for me to read. A pregnant woman decides to drink heavily, and then has a crisis of conscience hoping that her unborn baby will be unaffected while simultaneously covering her tracks so that her husband will not discover her. One gets the feeling this won’t be the only time the child needs a bit of luck. Her husband loses his temper, and smashes his fist into the cupboard and calls her a whore. She thinks to herself, “Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it. Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.” Whoa.The title story - a lonely school administrator rides a subway to meet a woman…not his wife in Connecticut. He has had multiple affairs that have separated him from his wife and his daughter, the latter he regrets. He gets involved with a married grad student who becomes pregnant and has an abortion. He is a sad man, who does not form lasting relationships with women, and loses children.The Intruder – A documentary maker (or maybe someone who claims to be but never really finishes his work) studies gay porn with the intent that he will make a documentary about producers of such material. His younger partner doesn’t seem to have much in common with them and there is seething animosity between them. He is an older intellectual, and the younger man is just not. Finally, he finds a movie that includes his partner and is shocked.The Mail Lady – Like Gregor Samsa in the Metamorphosis, we occupy the thoughts of a man no one can hear. The man is a born-again Christian who has suffered a debilitating stroke. His thoughts are fairly clear, but he cannot verbalize them. His wife patronizes or ignores him and seems bent on finding her life after he is gone. His life is absurd. I think this is the best story in the collection.See my other reviews here!
Christ. I mean it’s good – obviously it’s good. David Gates is probably my favourite guy writing right now. Although I worry that this is more a dispositional thing for me than it is evidence of inherent literary merit. Time, and time, and time, and time again, I read this and found thoughts that I've had articulated in a language maybe two or three notches above what I've used. Which is to say I've no idea whether or not this is good, just all very familiar. There are more fissions of recognition per page here – that slight taking in of breath because somebody has described a familiar feeling, and described it familiarly or persuasively – than anything else I’ve read in years. There’s a bit where the narrator’s trying to imagine his dead wife’s headspace just before a fatal car accident; “’Oh my god,’ and then ‘Oh well, fuck it.’” 'And then a bit later:“Dad?” he said, when we’d walked another block. “Was there some place you wanted to be?”You don’t tell your son dead and in heaven.'I don’t know. Gates does sad, over-literate drunks really well, is all. Do we need more of that? Well. Maybe not need, but.Anyway. Clever, and angry, and drunk, and pathetic, and funny, and erudite. Far worse ways to spend a weekend.
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When I think about just how much I enjoyed reading David Gates’ The Wonders of the Invisible World, I have to laugh. I got the book completely by mistake. I mooched it thinking it was a collection by David Schickler who wrote Kissing in Manhattan, another book I loved. I find it difficult to write about books that I liked. It’s hard because I often come up, “I liked it because it was good” which is just about the lamest most unhelpful thing to say. It also doesn’t help that I recently read Salon’s bunch of bullshit about the death of literary criticism.Read the rest on iwilldare.com
—Jodi
David Gates wrote two quirky, critically acclaimed novels ("Jernigan" and "Preston Falls") in the 90's that I liked well enough to read twice each (and maybe will again). I wasn't aware of this short story collection published as a book in 1999 until recently. As with most short story collections, I enjoyed some more than others, but mostly more over less. All in all, darkly funny, poignant, smart character-driven stories that illustrate how human lives are messy and how we contribute to that mess in spite of ourselves.
—Chris
