A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

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).

About the Author :
David Gates lives in Missoula, Montana and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was an editor at Newsweek, where he specialised in music and books. He is the author of two novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls, and the story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World. Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Paris Review and Granta.

Review :
Dark and funny, bleak and brilliant ... David Gates makes me sick with envy David Gates is a wonderful writer. The stories in A Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully realised, entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise, outrageous and funny - all at the same time [Gates's stories are] nimbly crafted ... rendered with meticulous emotional detail and an astringent sense of the absurdities and self-indulgences of contemporary life. Brutal, viciously intelligent and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters ... gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing A true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever Where has David Gates been all of my life? How is it that I've missed a writer who transforms all our failures and foibles into tales so gripping they read like great mystery novels? A Hand Reached Down To Guide Me is as unflinching as fiction gets, one of those books that feels like a discovery from the first page to the last. Malice and goodness duke it out in the dark hearts of David Gates's characters ... [He] isn't one to pass judgments. He just sends devastatingly original dispatches from the heart of darkness ... It broadens the spectrum of truthfulness and emotion for which he is known [and] captures both the unfettered love and flashes of rage. Deliciously wicked ... The naughty musings most of us choose to ignore compel Gates's characters to act ... These people mock their demons and, when called to account, exhibit such complexity, humor and intelligence that you'll savor every page. While David Gates' style is different, the tone edgier, he shares Richard Ford's understanding of the self-destructive aspects of human nature...Gates' strengths are sharp, witty dialogue, sexual tension and subtlety. Also, a non-judgmental tone, even when his characters do something devastatingly cruel. The irreverent and confident prose of this American writer is bewitching. The collection begins with Banishment, a novella that reminds this reader, at least, of wry American authors - Updike, Roth, McInerney - who write of jaded men and smart women, literature, sex and booze all in one breath ... Gates's landscapes are deliciously detailed - you can feel the sofa fabric, read the newspapers, smell the bourbon - but his tours de force are his sublime characters. You will fall in love with (or hate) every damn sexy, well-read, disillusioned one of them. Funny and caustic ... Destruction, damage and manipulation are served up with the kind of devilish bleakness that's hard to resist.