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A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Stories and a Novella

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Author David Gates
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Paperback
$21.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Apr 19, 2016 | 336 Pages | 9780804168748
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A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young, old or somewhere in between, who are broadly knowledgeable and often creative and variously accomplished, whether as doctors, composers, academics or journalists. Terrifyingly self-aware, each one of them carries the full weight of the human condition: parents in assisted-living facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. In settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast, we follow their lives, alternately hilarious and tragic, as they refuse to go gently—even when they’re going nowhere fast. Relentlessly inventive, these eleven stories and novella prove yet again that David Gates is one of our most talented, witty and emotionally intelligent writers.

“Brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories.” —Ben Marcus, The New Yorker

“Knowing and frank stories. . . a smart book about smart, articulate people who get in their own way again and again [with] not a lazy phrase on view.” —Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book Review

“This is David Gates at his best. . . . It’s a book of fiction about people you’ll never believe aren’t real.” —Dana Varinsky, Time Out New York

“This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.” —Sara Nelson, Amazon

“Gates is a master of variation [and] how good this book is, how craftily conversational the prose is, how often seemingly tossed-off lines produce that coveted spine tingle.” —Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“He’s really, really funny about failure.  Nobody writes about failure better than David Gates.” —Lorin Stein, NPR

“David Gates is a wonderful  writer. The stories in A Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully realized, entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise, outrageous and  funny—all at the same time.” —Geoff Dyer 

“This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.” —Sara Nelson, Amazon

“Remarkable. . .  Gates turns a clear yet compassionate eye on a motley crew of characters who cheat, drink, snort, and lie their way through the autumn of their lives [and] the result is a moving account of flawed existence.” —The New Yorker 

“Stories with crystalline urgency. . . Gates is one of the writers keeping the classic American short story alive [and he] gets his people right, both men and women. . . . His first collection in fifteen years carries the weight of maturity; of being more acquainted with the impulses and compromises one makes over the course of a lifetime.” —Jana Martin, Chronogram

“The collection is really good [but] I’m surprised more isn’t made of his comic talents. There’s a caustic wit at work on nearly every page; empathy and misanthropy match stride for stride in a way that recalls Cheever at his best. In ‘Banishment’—a previously unpublished novella about a spectacularly bad marriage—it sometimes seems there’s an act of casual betrayal on every page, each designed to puncture another set of social mores.” —Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review

“Gates [has] staked out a territory, the anxieties of a particular corner of the middle class: artsy, at one time hip or (even slightly) radical, aspirational [in] creativity or spirit. That these aspirations have crumbled is part of the point, as his characters reckon with the compromises, physical and emotional, that living brings [as well as] the tension between the profane and the sacred, between the height of our ambitions and the depths of our desires. . . .These [stories] capture a floating insubstantiality we can’t help but recognize because it also belongs to us.”  —David L. Uhlin, The Los Angeles Times

“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.” — Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“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.” —Kristy Davis, More magazine

“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.” —Adam Ross
The day after we’d had dinner, he called me at the paper, to thank me and my young man for coming out with him, then waited a week to call again. He happened to be on his way north from the city, and did I have time for a quick drink? I could hear my husband typing in the next cubicle. “That sounds fine,” I said.
“Wonderful. You’re welcome to bring your young man along, but I don’t think he likes me much.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s probably not necessary.”
“Even better then. Five thirty too early for you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And what’s a good place? I don’t really know this town.”
The typing stopped. “It’s hard to say just now.”
“Surely there must be—ah. God, I’m a little slow today. You’re not alone.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, let me think. I passed an Applebee’s coming in on Route Nine. You know where it is? We can go someplace from there.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, thanks.”
“Copy desk giving you shit?” my husband said.
“No, just something I needed to find out about.”
“It was that guy.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Is that why you’ve been so weird?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“This is too stupid to even discuss,” I said. “Anyway—” I nodded
over at the editor, who was talking on the phone.
“Then what time are you coming home?” he said.
“Not late,” I said. “I was supposed to meet somebody for a quick
drink. Probably seven, seven thirty? We could order in and maybe have a little date night after.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“Andrea,” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized it would have been more in character for me to resent being questioned. “I used to work with her at Newsweek? She’s taking the train up.”
“Mind if I come along?”
“It’s going to be a lot of girl talk. But sure, if you want.” Worst case, I could get away and call the man, then take my husband to a bar and keep checking my watch. Andrea’s such a flake—that’s what I’d say. How could he not believe in Andrea?
“No, on second thought I think I’ll bag it.”
“You weren’t testing me, were you?”
“What would be the use?” he said.
The man was waiting outside the Applebee’s in his truck, his window down, reading the Times. I’d put on a halter top that morning—it was such a hot day, and I hadn’t thought I’d have to see anybody. Now I wished I’d had time to drive home and change. “Let’s just go here,” I said. “I shouldn’t stay long.”
“I suppose their liquor’s the same as anybody else’s,” he said. “You’ll have to provide the ambience.” He opened his door, stood up on tip- toes and stretched his arms over his head. His T-shirt came up and exposed an inch of still-lean waistline, which might have been the idea. “It’s certainly the last place anybody’d come looking for you.”
“My husband doesn’t spy on me. If that’s what you mean.”
“No, I can’t imagine your putting up with that. Still, a booth might be in order.”
“You’re making this sound like something it isn’t,” I said.
“Good for you,” he said. “You’ve spared us the preliminaries.” He put a palm on my bare shoulder blade. Up to that point, I hadn’t thought I was seriously considering this man. “Suppose we go in and talk about it.”
When the waitress had set down our drinks and moved off, he said, “Since you’re pressed for time—cheers, by the way. It’s obvious that I’ve taken a shine to you, and it’s obvious that I’m much too old, and of course you have your young man—my God, you look like you’ve just been shot. This is much more embarrassing for me.”
“You don’t seem that embarrassed,” I said.
“I’m not, oddly enough. The situation is embarrassing, yes. But basically you’re either going to tell me to go peddle my papers or you’re not. Which should be clarifying. My position is just that I’d like some time with you.”
“That would be difficult,” I said.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’ve heard stronger expressions of outrage.”
“I’ll bet you have.”
“Oh sure, you can typecast me if you want to. You might take it as
a compliment that I’m not trying to sneak up on you. Just one person to another.”
“Except that I’m married.”
“As was I.”
“And I love my husband.”
“I’d think the worse of you if you didn’t. I’m not trying to make your
life any harder.” He picked up the glossy menu, with color photos of steaks. “God, this place is what hell’s going to be like.”
“Why would you think my life is hard?” I said.
“ ‘Getting through the day’? Isn’t that what you said? Sounds like joy unbounded.”
“So what would we do? If I could spend time with you? Apparently you’re good at sitting around and drinking.”
“Not much escapes you, does it?” he said. “I was thinking that what we did would be entirely up to us. We could start out just being kind to each other.”
Copyright © 2015 by David Gates. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
DAVID GATES lives in Missoula, where he teaches at the University of Montana, and in Granville, New York, where he is associated with the Bennington Writing Seminars. A former Guggenheim Fellow, for many years he was a writer and editor at Newsweek, where he specialized in music and books. View titles by David Gates

About

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young, old or somewhere in between, who are broadly knowledgeable and often creative and variously accomplished, whether as doctors, composers, academics or journalists. Terrifyingly self-aware, each one of them carries the full weight of the human condition: parents in assisted-living facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. In settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast, we follow their lives, alternately hilarious and tragic, as they refuse to go gently—even when they’re going nowhere fast. Relentlessly inventive, these eleven stories and novella prove yet again that David Gates is one of our most talented, witty and emotionally intelligent writers.

“Brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories.” —Ben Marcus, The New Yorker

“Knowing and frank stories. . . a smart book about smart, articulate people who get in their own way again and again [with] not a lazy phrase on view.” —Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book Review

“This is David Gates at his best. . . . It’s a book of fiction about people you’ll never believe aren’t real.” —Dana Varinsky, Time Out New York

“This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.” —Sara Nelson, Amazon

“Gates is a master of variation [and] how good this book is, how craftily conversational the prose is, how often seemingly tossed-off lines produce that coveted spine tingle.” —Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“He’s really, really funny about failure.  Nobody writes about failure better than David Gates.” —Lorin Stein, NPR

“David Gates is a wonderful  writer. The stories in A Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully realized, entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise, outrageous and  funny—all at the same time.” —Geoff Dyer 

“This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.” —Sara Nelson, Amazon

“Remarkable. . .  Gates turns a clear yet compassionate eye on a motley crew of characters who cheat, drink, snort, and lie their way through the autumn of their lives [and] the result is a moving account of flawed existence.” —The New Yorker 

“Stories with crystalline urgency. . . Gates is one of the writers keeping the classic American short story alive [and he] gets his people right, both men and women. . . . His first collection in fifteen years carries the weight of maturity; of being more acquainted with the impulses and compromises one makes over the course of a lifetime.” —Jana Martin, Chronogram

“The collection is really good [but] I’m surprised more isn’t made of his comic talents. There’s a caustic wit at work on nearly every page; empathy and misanthropy match stride for stride in a way that recalls Cheever at his best. In ‘Banishment’—a previously unpublished novella about a spectacularly bad marriage—it sometimes seems there’s an act of casual betrayal on every page, each designed to puncture another set of social mores.” —Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review

“Gates [has] staked out a territory, the anxieties of a particular corner of the middle class: artsy, at one time hip or (even slightly) radical, aspirational [in] creativity or spirit. That these aspirations have crumbled is part of the point, as his characters reckon with the compromises, physical and emotional, that living brings [as well as] the tension between the profane and the sacred, between the height of our ambitions and the depths of our desires. . . .These [stories] capture a floating insubstantiality we can’t help but recognize because it also belongs to us.”  —David L. Uhlin, The Los Angeles Times

“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.” — Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“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.” —Kristy Davis, More magazine

“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.” —Adam Ross

Excerpt

The day after we’d had dinner, he called me at the paper, to thank me and my young man for coming out with him, then waited a week to call again. He happened to be on his way north from the city, and did I have time for a quick drink? I could hear my husband typing in the next cubicle. “That sounds fine,” I said.
“Wonderful. You’re welcome to bring your young man along, but I don’t think he likes me much.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s probably not necessary.”
“Even better then. Five thirty too early for you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And what’s a good place? I don’t really know this town.”
The typing stopped. “It’s hard to say just now.”
“Surely there must be—ah. God, I’m a little slow today. You’re not alone.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, let me think. I passed an Applebee’s coming in on Route Nine. You know where it is? We can go someplace from there.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, thanks.”
“Copy desk giving you shit?” my husband said.
“No, just something I needed to find out about.”
“It was that guy.”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Is that why you’ve been so weird?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“This is too stupid to even discuss,” I said. “Anyway—” I nodded
over at the editor, who was talking on the phone.
“Then what time are you coming home?” he said.
“Not late,” I said. “I was supposed to meet somebody for a quick
drink. Probably seven, seven thirty? We could order in and maybe have a little date night after.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“Andrea,” I said. As soon as I said it, I realized it would have been more in character for me to resent being questioned. “I used to work with her at Newsweek? She’s taking the train up.”
“Mind if I come along?”
“It’s going to be a lot of girl talk. But sure, if you want.” Worst case, I could get away and call the man, then take my husband to a bar and keep checking my watch. Andrea’s such a flake—that’s what I’d say. How could he not believe in Andrea?
“No, on second thought I think I’ll bag it.”
“You weren’t testing me, were you?”
“What would be the use?” he said.
The man was waiting outside the Applebee’s in his truck, his window down, reading the Times. I’d put on a halter top that morning—it was such a hot day, and I hadn’t thought I’d have to see anybody. Now I wished I’d had time to drive home and change. “Let’s just go here,” I said. “I shouldn’t stay long.”
“I suppose their liquor’s the same as anybody else’s,” he said. “You’ll have to provide the ambience.” He opened his door, stood up on tip- toes and stretched his arms over his head. His T-shirt came up and exposed an inch of still-lean waistline, which might have been the idea. “It’s certainly the last place anybody’d come looking for you.”
“My husband doesn’t spy on me. If that’s what you mean.”
“No, I can’t imagine your putting up with that. Still, a booth might be in order.”
“You’re making this sound like something it isn’t,” I said.
“Good for you,” he said. “You’ve spared us the preliminaries.” He put a palm on my bare shoulder blade. Up to that point, I hadn’t thought I was seriously considering this man. “Suppose we go in and talk about it.”
When the waitress had set down our drinks and moved off, he said, “Since you’re pressed for time—cheers, by the way. It’s obvious that I’ve taken a shine to you, and it’s obvious that I’m much too old, and of course you have your young man—my God, you look like you’ve just been shot. This is much more embarrassing for me.”
“You don’t seem that embarrassed,” I said.
“I’m not, oddly enough. The situation is embarrassing, yes. But basically you’re either going to tell me to go peddle my papers or you’re not. Which should be clarifying. My position is just that I’d like some time with you.”
“That would be difficult,” I said.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’ve heard stronger expressions of outrage.”
“I’ll bet you have.”
“Oh sure, you can typecast me if you want to. You might take it as
a compliment that I’m not trying to sneak up on you. Just one person to another.”
“Except that I’m married.”
“As was I.”
“And I love my husband.”
“I’d think the worse of you if you didn’t. I’m not trying to make your
life any harder.” He picked up the glossy menu, with color photos of steaks. “God, this place is what hell’s going to be like.”
“Why would you think my life is hard?” I said.
“ ‘Getting through the day’? Isn’t that what you said? Sounds like joy unbounded.”
“So what would we do? If I could spend time with you? Apparently you’re good at sitting around and drinking.”
“Not much escapes you, does it?” he said. “I was thinking that what we did would be entirely up to us. We could start out just being kind to each other.”
Copyright © 2015 by David Gates. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

DAVID GATES lives in Missoula, where he teaches at the University of Montana, and in Granville, New York, where he is associated with the Bennington Writing Seminars. A former Guggenheim Fellow, for many years he was a writer and editor at Newsweek, where he specialized in music and books. View titles by David Gates

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