A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

A woman moving calamitously into middle-age; a musician taking in a friend with terminal cancer; a failed actor moving to the country: cynical, unreliable, sinking into middle age or alcoholism, dealing with physical decline or mediocrity, Gates's characters are a dark reflection of our own urban and suburban lives. Terrifyingly self-aware, overcome by the burdens of the human condition, they find their impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. But wherever it is they're going - and sometimes it's nowhere fast - they won't go gently.

Relentlessly inventive, by turns comical, caustic and tragic (and often all three together) but always moving, the novella and ten short stories which make up

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me reinforce David Gates as 'a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.' (New York Magazine).

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 6, 2015

About the author

David Gates (born January 8, 1947) is an American journalist and novelist. His first novel, Jernigan (1991), about a dysfunctional one-parent family, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This was followed by a second novel, Preston Falls (1998), and two short story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1999) and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me (2015). He has published short stories in The New Yorker, Tin House, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, H.O.W, The Oxford American, The Journal of Country Music, Esquire magazine, Ploughshares, GQ, Grand Street, TriQuarterly, and The Paris Review. Gates is also a Guggenheim Fellow.
Until 2008, he was a senior writer and editor in the Arts section at Newsweek magazine, specializing in articles on books and music.
He teaches in the graduate writing program at The University of Montana as well as at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Here he is a member of the Dog House Band, performing on the guitar, pedal steel, and vocals.

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are trenchant, sad, and often cruel. And terribly funny. The prose is outstanding, and David Gates can write an ending like nobody's business. I've read complaints that many of the characters in different stories are too similar to one another, a complaint I frankly don't understand. Does anyone complain about like-minded people in the stories of Carver, Cheever, Moore, O'Conner, Baldwin or a hundred other short story writers? David Gates understands a certain type of person and he writes about them inside out. What's the problem? Droll and devastating slices of life— I loved this book.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Often I when I rate a book down, I say, "don't avoid due to my not liking it". In this case, I might give the opposite warning; my eventual 4 star rating should not be seen as an invitation to try this one on for size.

The author can sure trace the lives of some pretty unsavory folks. Not the "unsavory" kind I normally read about either- these are quite the opposite. Folks who listen to NPR, have little worry about the path they are on in a mostly privileged life, and find company at art museums or discussing indie films (the more obscure the better). But make no mistake, the usual dysfunction makes its way to the surface and implodes back to destroy the core from which it lurked.

Mostly, these characters are utter failures when it comes to relationship and decision making. Drugs- yep, they make that turn, sexual deviance- a plenty, and of all persuasions- most all roads lead to the dead end they actual predict as the landing. Grit lit has found a new sub-genre- instead of driving old rusted out Ford trucks- this cast drive Saabs and Subarus. Relating to character, this man can write like he's anyone- male, female, young, old, smart, stupid, happy, mad, sad- he get's the voice.

I do hate that no redemption (save a few) really gets found. At first, the upper-crust references were distracting, but I eventually decided I could hang. My favorites were near the back of the book- which I normally find to be opposite in most short story collections. Glad to have won this one in a first-reads Giveaway- but I will not be surprised to watch the reviews come in all over the board once this one get's released next week and readers decide if they can get past the utter screwed-uppedness that this one leaves with every tale.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are not happy little stories. Not that stories need to be happy, of course, but these are depressing in the “this is how life is” kind of way. These are upper class people, for the most part- academics, artists, writers, architects- all people who are well educated. These are people who read Shakespeare to unwind and are too high brow to watch TV- even public TV. These are also people who are very self-aware, which makes you wonder why they continue with their self-destructive behaviors, knowing where it will lead them.

For these are people who seem to be all about sex and drugs and alcohol- but no rock and roll; they listen only to classical. Or perhaps some early jazz. They never met an impulse they didn’t like, and they follow through on them pretty much every time. A lot of the main characters are fighting against aging, and the disappointment of not having lived the lives they feel they deserved. They will not go gently into that good night; they will go staggering and slurring, with bottles of Viagra clutched in their hands as they reach for the next young sexual conquest, talking wittily the whole while.

The stories are arranged in a progression; they work their way through sex, to drugs and alcohol, and finally make it to illness and death. Only the last story-the title story, the death story- ends on a hopeful note, with people acting for the long run rather than the immediate impulse. The characters are nearly interchangeable story to story; person who fails in their profession, aging person trying to hold back time by having sex with younger people, person who has spouse but can’t resist having sex with other people, person who drinks too much/does speed/does heroin/smokes too much pot. I suppose the point of the stories is that we’re all, even the most respected of us, animals when it comes down to it.

The stories may be devoid of likable characters, but they are brilliantly written, rather as if noir was written by intellectuals. I think the self-awareness of the narrators makes the stories different from most. They compel a person to keep reading; it’s like being held by a tale at a cocktail party, held by an ancient mariner in tweed.

[Lydia · Rating 1 out of 5]

In one of his interviews the writer David Gates said he had no interest in depicting normal people. In his short stories book “A hand reached down to guide me” there is no sane person. All his “heroes” are promiscuous drug addicts and alcoholics. It appears that Mr. Gates does not know any other people. Described in his book representatives of our intellectual elite are professors in our colleges and universities. They teach our children that everything is possible: to cheat on spouses; to sleep with daughters and wives of friends, colleagues or relatives, man or woman prostitutes; to lie, to drink and take drugs, to betray, to sloth. Reading this book was an ordeal. Sometimes the narration seemed to be an incoherent stream of conscience of a person under influence. It was difficult to follow who said what, and most important why. It’s a shame that such a talented person wasted his life on being one of the people he describes and evidently knows pretty well.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is rare that a collection shows as much excellence. A novella followed by eleven stories, this volume well deserves the comparison to Carver and Cheever, with the consistency of time, place and character. Each of these stories, set in Manhattan and New England, is populated with people above average in education, privilege and promise. Their situations, while affected by the "wasted gifts" they seem to enjoy, are familiar, even if their reactions are not. Whether they are a pair of adulterers in a cabin looking for the man in the moon, a contractor in a western Massachusetts town undergoing gentrification, a composer, an actor -- these characters have more than the usual life breathed into them by David Gates, their creator. Each story is worth of an entire novel's worth of attention.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was first published, in a more readable format, at scrivenerscreed.com

Over fifteen years ago David Gates released his stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World. Back then, Walter Kirn of New York magazine christened him the “true heir” to Raymond Carver. Hallelujah. This summer, after one and a half decades, Gates is back with his novella and story collection, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me.

What does it mean to be the heir to Raymond Carver? A young writer might be flattered, perhaps even living under a sort of charm of literary inevitability. Even so, the writer must recognize the risk. Just as a promise is made, a promise must be fulfilled. No writer wants to grow up to be an understudy. Every writer wants to supersede his progenitors. Embedded in the front flap of Hand Reached Down, Mr. Kirn’s prophecy survives. Just as the pernicious comparison persists, I believe the reader will find that Hand Reached Down finally sets it to rest on page one.

For those already familiar with Gates, much of his charm is retained through a regular cast of educated artistic types white knuckling cocktails, tangled in trysts, and delivering precise reports of sardonic wit. Don’t misunderstand me, Wonders was in its own right a success with ambition and gravitas; however, read for instance the first story in that selection, “The Bad Thing,” then compare it to only the first eight pages of the novella in Hand Reached Down, “Banishment.” In the former, a tense, simmering tale of a pregnant couple engrossed in deceit and repressed resentment which plucks along perfectly well until wam, Gates spends his final paragraph essentially writing an explanatory note, uncertain of his own powers laid out in the story. The first few pages of “Banishment” is a far cry from the work of inhibited talent, but a truly masterful literary pull. Its economy would make Hemingway’s ghost weep whiskey. Its authoritative voice and wit would stump Twain.

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me was released late May 2015. You can find your copy here.

Steven Bergmark is the former founder and editor of Combat! literary magazine and an editor at scrivenerscreed.

Despite the stories of Hand Reached Down being published over a wide berth stretching from to 2001 to 2015, it strikes one as having a unifying undercurrent. Listen to the Stanley Brothers’ 1961 tune “My Sinful Past,” and you’ll find within the chorus the namesake of Hand Reached Down. Listen more closely, and you’ll find a resonant tone in harmony with many of Gates’ protagonists. Idle through more of the Brothers’ tunes, and you may find yourself within a similar headspace as Gates’ subjects. The blues, with its simple, repetitive harmonies finds its force through instilling a sense of shared suffrage and optimistic cadences laid over by desperate lyricism. For those of us not living or having lived in the 1960’s or having any ingrained connection to southern blues culture, such as Gates’ characters, one can see how this alien sense of nostalgia when commingled with the intellectualized search for authenticity results in much of what Gates’ protagonists, who often resort to abandoning their initial worlds in order to find both freedom and life in the country, suffer from.

Allow me to drop that track momentarily to remark upon a separate but related feature of Gates’ emerging style. Much of Gates’ power is sourced in how he orients his characters in time. They do not stand before a Frostian fork in the road but a long, straight highway. There’s no romance of the winding route by which one can note each distinctive curve and landmark. Gates’ work is centered on the tyranny of indistinguishable time, a dusty highway marked with imperceptible shifts, tiny sacrifices and concessions which appear at the moment to mean little. Ten or fifteen more miniscule adjustments, and the desert tapestry suddenly strikes one as deathly similar to the road seen in a time so far gone it’s hard to recall if not for its depressing congruity to the present.

It’s the combination of these two, the search for not just freedom and life but a freely chosen life in foreign yet perhaps rhythmically familiar worlds and unforgiving time stitched together between ambition and desire with threads of compromise and the haze of moment folding into moment which serves as that optimistic cadence and desperate lyricism which marks Hand Reached Down as, in the fundamental sense, a book of the blues.

The final pages of the last story, "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me" strikes at the heart of these notions. In it, the protagonist lives in the house he shared years ago with his exwife. An old friend dying of cancer asks if he could die in that house, and he obliges. They never spent a great deal of time with one another, seeing each other for a few days at a time over the years, but they share between themselves a deep appreciation of folk music. After a rather confused and strained expiration, our protagonist's girlfriend upbraids him:
I'm not spending another night there. You can do what you want. Wear her fucking aprons, feed her fucking chickens. Sing your dead-people songs. Read your dead-people books. You're going to kill yourself one of these days, making that drive in the winter. Look, this is my fault–I should have helped you. But you don't even know who I am.
The story concludes, one page later:
It only took Janna two months to sell the old house on the dirt road. She got us our asking price, enough to buy a three-bedroom Craftsmen style bungalow–an office for her, a study for me–four blocks from the health-food store...I play squash once a week with my department chair. We've bought a flat-screen television, forty-six inches, high definition...You see all this as a defeat, I know. I would have. But I can't begin to tell you.
This final line, in the final story, offers the reader a bit of air. It finds for Gates and ourselves some relief, stuck somewhere in the interstices–

Gates need not fear any longer being cast beneath the shadow of Carver. No doubt, Carver is a part of Gates’ literary heritage, but Hand Reached Down is an expression well beyond the Carver paradigm and a self-sufficient literary achievement. Yet, in honor of that heritage, I’ve arranged a complementary drinking menu inspired by and to be enjoyed in conjunction with Hand Reached Down.

Enjoy however you damn well like:

“Banishment-” The novella is best paired with a pitcher margarita using medium to top shelf tequila if read in one sitting. If two, use a house tequila for the margarita and for the second sitting down a few airline bottles of Dewars.

“An Actor Prepares-” Gin and tonic. Hold the tonic.

“The Curse of the Davenports-” Gin and tonic, with tonic. If you’re looking to pace yourself: a glass of sweet wine, watered down.

“A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens-” Break time’s over. Half a bottle of sherry.

“Alcorian A-1949-” I advise reading this on your Sunday.

“Desecrators-” Bloody Mary served in hotel-grade plastic cups.

“George Lassos Moon-” Picking up the pace, now. A shot of vodka served in a prescription pill bottle.

“A Secret Station-” A bottle of Riesling with the cork pushed in, perhaps paired with ill-gotten Percodan.

“Round on Both Ends, High in the Middle-” A Jameson, and another for the cuckolding mistress (or mister) you’ve been seeing.

“Locals-” A bottle of nondescript grain alcohol, best served outside a funeral home on the sly.

“Monsalvat-” A fifth of Jack or Tanqueray, chilled in a Holiday Inn ice bucket.

“A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me-” Give it a rest for chrissake.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 1 out of 5]

That Demeaning Word

I don't know how to review this collection without appearing merely an elderly prude. True, I am in my seventies, but I certainly don't think that stories should stop at the bedroom door. I have long since learned to take the four-letter words in my stride. What troubles me here is not the use of the f-word in itself, but the fact that it seems to be used in preference to anything else, including "love." To hear characters, women as well as men, describing their relationships in such exclusively physical terms may be thought cool, objective, and liberated, but it also describes lives that are barren and unstable. I have read the opening novella and half the ensuing stories, and I don't think they include a single lasting relationship. The subjects seem to be adultery, divorce, opportunistic hook-ups, and people making stupid mistakes. There is very little happiness in sight.

I don't know what all this is supposed to add up to: it seems to be about damaged and selfish people, the waste of money that could have helped somebody, the waste of gifts that could have given somebody pleasure—am I leaving out anything?

This is the narrator of the novella, "Banished," describing her own story, but it could describe most of the short stories too. But I did like her voice; she has an amusing self-deprecation in her tawdriness as she describes the failure of her first marriage and her deliberate sabotage of her second. And the 90-page length allowed time for the reader to get into her head. In many of the stories I read, however, the relative compression only heightened the instability; "A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens" contained references to about a dozen sexual couplings (gay as well as straight) in under twenty pages. Another story that I set aside overnight proved almost incomprehensible in the morning, because there was so much transience without a stabilizing through line.

I did find myself liking the first and last of the short stories a bit more than the rest, though. "Performing for You" features a has-been actor brought in to give professional support to a summer community production of , and the theater world at least is fun. The title story, which concludes the collection, also features an aging performer, this time a musician. Yes, the story contains the usual quota of broken relationships and demeaning language, but when something serious intervenes at the end—death—there is almost a possibility of redemption.

+ + + + + +

It is probably entirely happenstance, but I have just realized the source of my slight feeling of déjà vu. In reviewing another collection of short stories that I did not much like, The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories by Donald Antrim, I also picked out the first and last stories as partial exceptions. Not just that: the same subjects in the same places! The first short story in both books describes sexual goings-on at a bizarre open-air Shakespeare production; the protagonist in the last story in each is affected for the better by attending somebody's death bed. Weird, huh?

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gates beautifully illuminates the minds of his characters as they make abundantly bad decisions and have no qualms talking about their plight with arresting candor. It’s a smart book about smart, articulate people who reckon with the physical and emotional compromises that life brings. But reading the novella and these 11 stories back-to-back can be a bit draining; so read them one at a time and take your time reading them.

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

1star for author living in Missoula/teaching at UM, 1 star for a Chip Kidd cover, 1 star for being short stories...I think this will be a good one!

In the end: really loved the novella at the beginning, but the rest of the stories failed to grab me.

[Kyle Schnitzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the closest work to Cheever in a modern world. Loads of drinking and bad decisions. Fantastic work that'll remain on my shelf.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give it 10 stars if I could. Every story is a gem.

[Christie Bane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, I’m a little conflicted about this book. On the one hand... snappy dialogue, nice use of place in all the stories (even though virtually all of the places were places that I’ve spent time in and don’t like — Westchester County, New York, and random places around New England), vaguely interesting details about sex and substance use. All of those things... oh yes, plus genuinely good writing, made the 11-hour audiobook go by pleasantly. On the other hand, the general themes of aging and struggles with relationships, and the specific focus on the tedium of upper-middle-class, well-educated people trying to age gracefully, got so repetitive that I often couldn’t tell one story from another. If I tuned out for 10 seconds, I forgot everything about whatever individual story I was listening to, although the general good quality of the writing (and the narrators, in the audiobook) made it easy to fall back in without really having to worry about details like who was who and how did these people know each other and what was the actual story.

Maybe I just don’t get the genre of short stories. Is it too much to ask that they have endings? As opposed to just trailing off or ending abruptly? I would prefer some sort of drama with some sort of resolution, but these stories, like all the others I’ve read recently, just END, leaving me with the impression that these not-very-interesting characters will continue pursuing younger women, enjoying the escape provided by drugs and alcohol, and figuring out what to do about the looming awareness of their own mortality.

[Susan Emmet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this collection appalling and draining and utterly fascinating.
It drags you down and lifts you up. The characters are electric and I loved the title story, the last one.
Gates has been a long time coming back to print and I'm glad for this collection, hard as it often if to swill around with (largely) men and women who are educated, literate, artistic, accomplished, degraded and degrading.
It just amazes me to walk with and listen to such captive people who harbor little hope for much of a redemption and yank their way along.
But they're often hilarious in their degradation. Their voices are clear.
I also thought of Cheever and Carver and O'Connor while reading.
Small triumphs hard-earned.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Jernigan” and “Preston Falls” were compelling novels written by this author and published in the 1990s. I thought they were memorable, they featured well-drawn suburban male protagonists struggling with mid-life crises, anger issues, substance abuse and unfortunate decisions, among other things. Twenty-something years later, this book of shorter works features more affluent, stuffy characters struggling with mid or later life crises who also make bad decisions but with fewer good excuses. I preferred the earlier books.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fits neatly alongside Carver, Ford and Banks in its grittiness.
Something also calls Woody Allen to mind. Academics, creatives, lots of cultural references - literature, theatre, music. So much infidelity that it seems to be the natural state of things...an inevitability.
In some ways this harks back to Russian and French Masters, too.

[The Horror The Horror · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had he not mentioned some of my old stomping grounds, Harvard Square, Greenfield, MA, NYC, VT and some of the perennial issues of aging, sex, anxiety, work, work failure, I still would have loved these short stories.

[Simon Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gates is the way and the light. His stories are wise in the way that doesn't necessarily help, and often hinders a.k.a the only way. The final story is pitch perfect. As are the endings, at least, to all the others.

[John Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

nobody chronicles lives running off the rails as charmingly as David Gates.

[Duncan Birmingham]

Think I only read the novella part.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review of Wonders of the Invisible World

[Steph Girle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried so hard with this book, I really wanted to like it, but I called it quits with a few short stories to go. I think it says something when even short stories feel like a drag. I appreciate this book for what it is, I'm glad that there are books with no happy endings. On one hand it is refreshing to meet characters who don't evolve, aren't enlightened and just continually fuck up. However, there was just too much dark and not enough light for me. I understand the compilation has this theme, but I felt that so many of the characters, the settings and the plots were so much the same, I found them all mashing up into one as I finished each story. I also didn't get a lot of the references, perhaps because I'm too young or not a New Yorker. This book is definitely not made for everyone.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters in this collection will be familiar to readers of David Gates. They are older versions of the bitter and disenchanted men and women he wrote about in The Wonders of the Invisible World fifteen years ago. Now, as their squandered middle age drifts into memory, they take stock of their failure to make something better of their lives, and fall deeper into dysfunction. Each character, all of them elite and educated, too smart, in fact, for their own good, has come from privilege, and then veered off the trajectory of their own success down a dark rabbit hole of their own making.

Drugs, alcohol, and infidelity fuel one bad decision after another until, for most of them, it’s just too late to turn it around. Gates is a masterful writer. The stories are told in the first person, with narrators who reach through the fourth wall to pull the reader in, forcing her complicity in the narrative. At the same time, the narrators push the reader (and the other characters) away, through the use of obscure literary and musical references, and tangential ramblings, which they then explain and apologize for. We find the protagonists pompous and arrogant, yet, they make us feel unworthy of their company.

Here, the female narrator of the novella that starts the collection, wonders why she’s telling us her tale of woe:

‘I don’t know what this is all supposed to add up to: it seems to be about damaged and selfish people, the waste of money that could have helped somebody, the waste of gifts that could have given somebody pleasure - am I leaving out anything? I’m sorry to end without some note of redemption. See you after the shitshow, I guess.’

That about sums up the book. A shitshow, indeed, but one I enjoyed immensely.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this collection of eleven stories and a novella, but it does all get a bit repetitive. In story after story an older man (usually in his fifties or sixties) hooks up with a younger woman; one or both of them will be teachers and/or involved in music; they'll probably live in or own a house in a rural backwater (often with a cabin in the woods), refuse to own a TV, have a lot of sex (until he can't), drink a lot and rely on drugs to get them through the day. They'll have quiet fights where they psychoanalyse each other; eventually she will leave him. Occasionally Gates varies this by writing about a younger woman who hooks up with an older man. Et cetera.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a theme, and reading these as they appeared in literary journals over the course of a decade I'd probably have found them very rewarding. But at one story per day over twelve days the sense of déja vu rather started to set in, especially as the first person voices (regardless of gender) are all alike and even certain phrases crop up in more than one story.

Still, there were two stories - "Locals" and the title story "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me" - that deviated from the formula slightly. "Locals" is about a failed musician turned building contractor and the relationship he has with his male friends; and in the title story the woman doesn't leave him at the end. These were both particularly good and easily my favourites.

This was the first time I'd read Gates, and I enjoyed the experience enough to want to try him again, but next time I think I'd go for a novel.

[Natalie Serber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of David Gates. He's a master of concision and writes amazing dialog. His stories are populated by drug users, people in abusive relationships, the out-of-work, the out-of-luck, unwell, unfed, cheaters and the aging. Honestly, I began to feel beaten down by the characters' circumstances. And yet, his prose soars. Check out this paragraph:

“My brother, though, flew in from Colorado; none of us had seen him since he’d gotten clean and saved. I was three when he was born: my mother told me he was an accident, which was indiscreet of her, and I passed it on to him, which was unkind of me. I’d wanted him dead until he was thirteen, when I made him my little drug buddy. He’d dropped out of UConn—it was a wonder he lasted two semesters—and shot heroin, first in Willimantic, then the Lower East Side, then Seattle, then nobody knew where. Somehow he’d ended up in Colorado Springs, where he was drug free, married and a so-called elder in some right-wing church. When he walked into the funeral home, I had the weird thought that it was my father, come back as he was when I was little: he had a businessman’s haircut and a businessman’s blue pinstriped suit, and black-framed glasses like the ones my father had worn before he’d gotten contacts. I ran up to hug him and felt him turn aside to avoid contact with my breasts.”

I highly recommend David Gates, maybe don't read the entire book in one sitting.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gates characters are often New England academics, creative folk, intellectuals or intellectual wannabes. Hopefully that won’t be off putting to some because they are very real and almost uncomfortably honest in displaying their foibles, there are drugs and drinking and hard blue grass guitar strumming.

Gates was a former Newsweek staffer were he wrote about music and books so most of his stories have multiple references to literature and classical, jazz, and bluegrass music which I found enjoyable though probably too many of the references only brought vague recognition for me. Another theme Gates hits hard is dysfunctional or flat out unworkable relationships. The good news is he doesn’t leave his readers with a sense of despair because his insights have depth and hope no matter how broken or lonely his characters are. His male characters were more effecting than his female ones. I found myself enjoying his writing almost despite myself. If you begin to wonder why some of his stories give you a sense of déjà vu it’s probably because they’ve previously appeared in literary journals.

Thank you to the publisher for providing an ARC.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the novella (first in the book) I was hooked - Gates is sardonically funny, super-erudite, cynical, but about two-thirds of the way in, I was wondering if I’d be able to make it through the book. The unrelenting world weariness and persistent infidelities described in these stories can get kind of grim and draining. I checked it out from the library, otherwise I might have given it a rest for a while.

But I pushed through. These were mostly enjoyable: kind of like someone is settling you in on a rollercoaster to usher you through the lives of people smarter, meaner, and more disappointed than you, but that you still sort of recognize anyway. I’m not sure if they’re for everyone, and I couldn’t decide between 3 & 4 stars, but yeah - the fact I'm having a hard time describing them makes me give it 4 stars.

Gates was apparently a music and literature writer for Newsweek, and it shows. He slings around references to some pretty obscure stuff that I’m only familiar with through college lit classes and an ex-boyfriend who was really into 20th century classical/experimental music. Never thought I’d hear Morton Subotnick referenced in a short story, so I loved that.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me by David Gates is comprised of a novella and eleven short stories, each written about events that could easily be read as non-fiction, however this is indeed fiction. Gates’ writing style is unique and while I prefer a more lengthy writing style, it did not take me long to become accustom to his more choppy, short sentenced style. The eleven stories along with the novella are interesting, however the stories are neither uplifting nor inspiring, rather more about the affects of poor life choices by mainly intelligent and well off characters. I never felt a connection to any of the characters, however I did enjoy the stories, at least as well as one could enjoy self-destructive stories of individuals and families. A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is the first work I have read of Gates’ and I will definitely look into his other works. As far as this collection of short stories goes, if one enjoys short stories and is prepared for a less than cheery read, this may be the book for you.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Composed by a master craftsman, but wanted to give many of the characters either a hug or a shake, to move them along a little!
My favourite ended up being the guy awaiting his court date for a DUI charge - who was doing his self-destruct with proper energy, and his aunt and brother were great assets to his narrative - nuanced and on-the-nail in their roles.

Perhaps my mistake was reading the book in a few days - the stories might benefit from spaces between sittings because the premise for many stories is quite similar (older, drinking academic male has messy relationship track record usually due to hooking up with much younger female students). It can be interesting to explore the same territory so intensely over many pieces, especially when the characters' interactions are so 'clever', and the author was likely intending an intensity - almost discomfort - by holding us on the same note for a sustained stretch.
This man wrote Jernigan, which is a licence to do anything he likes thereafter! (J's a spectacularly well written novel).

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

is this ladlit? well disguised with a female protagonist?
the first story 'Banishment' tantalised and titillated, she's so brazen, so duplicitous, so cold and nasty. when she finally cheats it almost winds you (even though you know it's coming) - and I'm a sucker for a literary reference "reader she dumped me" is brilliant.

taken in by the sex and drugs and culture, by the dirty, smelly freshness of his (female) protagonists - this reads like an American 'Animals'. but after the 3rd or 4th story when the narrative voices are so similar/the same and I wonder...is this ladlit? is ,what feels fresh and nasty - a billion miles from Jane Eyre - actually a male fantasy? David Gates writes in the voice of a woman, then undresses her and touches her tits.
I should have been alerted by the Nick Hornby endorsement, this is John Niven, Ben Elton et al.
Sexy, druggy and yes I enjoyed it (I AM a lad) - but I felt a bit dirty, a bit embarrassed, afterwards. Wondered if David Gates is just a feckin perv.

[Frank Capria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was originally attracted to this collection by a review in the New York Times. The stories take place in geographies well known to me -- The Hudson valley and New England. The writing is crisp the characters' voices are clear, but about half way through the book I began feeling I was hearing the same story again and again. Only the names and addresses were changed.

Gates' characters are all similarly flawed. They are experiencing a midlife crisis, a failed marriage or long term relationship, and are substance abusers. There are easily half a dozen male academics who have had affairs with students. The non-academic 50-somethings seem to attract young women just as easily.

Another example early 21st century fiction where likable characters are in short supply. Surely someone can get through the day without a bump or a blow job from someone other than his SO. Can't we just have a protagonist or two we don't hate?