The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories
by David Gates
Knopf, $23 hard
The characters of the 10 stories in David Gates’ The Wonders of the Invisible World often display a terrifying faculty for contempt. They are overachievers in The City — New York. Gates’ sardonic characters carry their educations like raincoats against the storming banality of popular culture. They seek shelter in the country, sometimes within commuting distance, and sometimes avalanches of fear and failure block their return. They find the trinkets of mass culture maddeningly inane, yet they toy with the trite and the quotidian; they embrace it or use it as a weapon against each other. In “The Bad Thing,” the city couple in the country diner peruses the jukebox. “Nothing,” he says. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy Travis.” She, the narrator of this tale, “understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.” He hated the supermarket when they lived in the city, but now he smuggles candied breakfast cereals home. They eat Count Chocula for breakfast. In the night as he works on illustrations for a children’s book, a project on which he is desperately behind, he smokes in the hermetic refuge of his studio, though he has promised her he would quit. She gets drunk even though she is pregnant, and then sneaks off to buy more liquor to refill the bottle so he won’t know.
Gates catches his characters hopelessly strung between need and desire, and his narration moves credibly through the psyches of every age, gender, and persuasion without a stumble. In “Star Baby,” Billy, a gay man, raises his nephew while the boy’s mother is away in drug rehab. Despite a nagging fear that the homophobic society around him will mistakenly perceive him as a pederast — or perhaps because of that fear — he gives up his singles lifestyle to become a caring father. The slow shifts in the lives and hearts of Billy, the boy, and the mother point the way toward reconstruction of family in a culture that has dissolved tradition.
By the time the title story of the collection hits us, Gates’ relentless intensity and eye for details prepare us for the cynical language of a jaded narrator who describes his friend’s family as “Second wife, first child: you know the deal,” who cuts short his anecdote of how his own wife told him she was pregnant with “And enough of that story,” and who parenthetically adds to his confession of an affair, “You must have seen this coming.” Indeed, if not for Gates’ breathless storytelling set against craven materialism, the dissolution of addictions, and what one gay man calls “Who Would Jesus Do” bracelets, we would see it coming, but Gates leaves us punch drunk and fascinated with his technique even as he pummels us with the sad and terrible wonders of the now visible world.
This article appears in September 3 • 1999.