 | "It is a sort of vicarious experience, to have a carnival thrill-ride without experiencing it first-hand." |
From his two novels to date, the 1991 Pulitzer finalist Jernigan and this year's NBCC finalist Preston Falls, a reader can get a good fix on the typical Gatesian narrator. He drinks too much, d s a little dope, coke if he can get it, hash, too, and he lies about it, to himself, and with a little more conviction to his wife or his ex-wife, who also drinks too much, d s a little dope, coke if she can get it; and together they oversee (!) the raising of children, who drink too much, do a little dope and generally seem bound to become Gatesian narrators themselves.
It will be a tough life. Neither the eponymous Peter Jernigan nor Doug Willis of Preston Falls much likes himself, or his career or his wife or even the children. He will seek consolation in Dickens (The Pickwick Papers, usually), rock 'n' roll, the other vices aforementioned and hanging with the locals in small rural towns while the Great Career languishes in abandonment in New York City.
David Gates's new and first collection of stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World, out this month from Knopf, charts a similar emotionally and chemically toxic terrain, and the surveyor (with a few exceptions) might as well be Jernigan or Willis -- wh ver it is is just as depraved, candid, observant and most enchantingly unwise.
But Gates is not, in person, what one would expect from the wildness of his characters. Although he is easy to spot in the Manhattan bar where he has agreed to meet PW, his thin build, largish eyeglasses and salt-and-pepper puff of curly hair are familiar from the tony Marion Ettlinger jacket photos that adorn his books -- one is still surprised at his collected mien, his clear-eyed calm and politesse. Not the stuff of Peter Jernigan, surely.
In fact, this more buttoned-down demeanor, however incongruent with the male protagonists of his work, is perfectly suited to Gates's professional life as a staff writer for Newsweek for two decades. Graciously, he shows his working journalist background in offering quick advice on setting up the tape recorder -- "you probably don't want to have to hear back your own questions" -- and suggests a better location for the microphone, atop an upturned glass.
Although Gates has been quoted as saying that a "fascination with prurience is rooted in moral, ethical and spiritual curiosity," he is quick to point out that it is the fascination with other's people's troubles, not one's own, that he is talking about.
Moral Curiosity
"There must be some weird source of comfort in hearing or reading about bad things happening to people," he notes. Although he says he has no idea how to account for it, he feels it in himself. "It is a sort of vicarious experience, to have a carnival thrill-ride without experiencing it first-hand. I don't have to develop a raging coke habit or drink myself into a blackout. I can let my characters do it."
Indeed, in the crowded tavern filled with smoke and workmen shouting and waitresses bustling with burgers, Gates orders coffee.
"It is a sort of daydreaming," he continues. "Really more of a literary strategy than a reflection of my life."
That's not to say that Gates's life has been all smooth sailing (or that he won't order three Jack Daniels by night's end).
Born in a small Connecticut town in 1947 ("Same birthday as Elvis," he says in his bio) and raised as an only child, Gates flunked out of Bard College after three terms, enrolled in the University of Connecticut and managed a bachelor's degree there, but bailed out of the Ph.D. program when his Beckett dissertation ran into problems, although he'd finished the coursework. A marriage to the writer Ann Beattie brought them both to jobs at the University of Virginia and Harvard. And when Beattie's career took off, they moved to Connecticut, where she wrote and Gates "sort of fell apart," as he puts it.
"No job, no prospects, no direction. Ann was only writing, we got by on her income. She was selling stories to the New Yorker. Her first books, Chilly Scenes of Winter and Distortion, got enormous amounts of attention. And when Falling in Place came out, she was profiled in People magazine. Then our marriage broke up."
But Gates got another sort of break. Just when he was bout to take a job moving furniture in Bridgeport, his next-door neighbor, "a magazine-world old-timer" who was consulting for Newsweek, suggested Gates apply for an opening at the weekly answering readers' letters. He got the job immediately, and has been there ever since, "as letter-answerer, religion researcher and a writer about books and music." Nowadays, Gates is a senior writer in the arts section, and mixes plum assignments like a cover story on Bob Dylan with short reviews and notes. Along the way, a second marriage ended in divorce. Gates is now nearly a decade into a successful third marriage, and he and his wife and his stepdaughter split their time between Granville, in upstate New York, and Manhattan.
Writing on a Train
It was when he became a commuter, to the Newsweek job, that Gates began to take writing seriously. He wrote out a couple of novels in longhand on the train during the first five or six years, and then turned to what became Jernigan in 1986.
"I didn't show it to anyone till it was done. I asked my [current] wife if she wanted to see what it was I had been doing the last five years. Did it come to anything, I asked her. She said it did. So then, in 1990, I sent it out to about five agents, saying I have this book, this is my background, do you want to see it? I received nice letters back from everyone, a few wanted to see it, but Binky Urban at ICM got on the phone and called me, so she was first in a short line."
Gates admits that he was hesitant to send the book to Urban. "I thought she was too big-time. But she handles quite a few people at Newsweek, like Laura Shapiro and Ken Woodward and John Alter. I asked Ken and he said to go ahead, what's there to lose? And Binky liked it. And she sold it to Gary Fisketjon at Knopf within a week. Lightning!"
For Gates, who had struggled to find some solid career footing in the glare of Ann Beattie's success, and whose early efforts at the writing game were not fruitful, the turn of events was a happy surprise. "I didn't even publish a story till the year Jernigan was published," he says. "I had one set up in galleys at Harper's when Helen Rogan was there, but when Lewis Lapham returned from some hiatus, he spiked it. That was in '83."
The reviews of Jernigan were strong. The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani closed her assessment by saying, "Mr. Gates has created one of recent literature's most memorable anti-her s... and has established himself as a novelist of the very first order."
At mention of the reviews, Gates smiles and shrugs the shrug of the lucky. "Around then," he says, "there was a profile of Gary in GQ, and the big question was, Could this quintessential 'guy of the '80s' make it in the '90s, as Gary'd moved from Atlantic Monthly to Knopf at about that time. And they pointed to this novel Jernigan as one of the tests. Thank God his career didn't depend on its sales."
But the reviews and award nominations seemed to capture the attention of a certain audience, for apparently there is a small but avid cult of readers out there, as detailed in a Chicago Tribune piece. "I don't know who they are," admits Gates. "I get a few letters. It's not like I'm stalked or anything."Preston Falls had a gestation period that was longer than the one for Jernigan, but when it was published, it had the same polish and impact, though Gates wonders whether he actually "pulled his punches" in the second novel, as critic Michael Wood said in the Times. "He is a terrific critic," says Gates, "and I tend to believe the last thing I hear."
Preston Falls met generally with the same sort of acclaim as Jernigan, and just came up short in the NBCC fiction prize, losing to Alice Munro. Asked how it is that the new story collection followed so quickly on the heels of Preston Falls, Gates says, "It's the fulfillment of a two-book contract, and I pulled it together quickly, but carefully. I weeded out a few things, but it's not like I had a lot of stuff to weed."
Back to Beckett
Gates, who called himself a "Beckett man" in one interview, is, indeed, like his literary hero in many respects. They both plumb the depths of what people don't know, and it is part of the hard charm of their narrators. Whereas Gates's protagonist will say of an assignation, "I found the place okay -- a name like J.P. Donleavy's, Something Something Somebodys," Beckett's lonely, wizened speaker will say, "I think it was a larch, I'll call it a larch."
"Those are purely Beckett moves on my part," says Gates. "At some point I realized that the parameters of people's ignorance is also to be explored. You can make a kind of p try -- or Beckett can, I just try -- out of blunt candor. The character d sn't need to know everything, and the reader d sn't need to be told everything. That's to be avoided."
And though Gates agrees that he has indeed found a consistent voice in his work, there are some stories in the new collection that range a bit afield from the novels. Two stories have gay themes, and a third, "The Mail Lady, is about an older man disabled by a stroke who waits intently for the mailwoman to come by in her little motorized scooter, which he calls a moon vehicle. What is striking is that for the first time, Gates is writing about someone who d sn't seem on the surface to be the author himself or one of his contemporaries. "The story owes its shape to Beckett's Malone Dies," he says, "with this guy immobilized by a stroke, his speech almost unintelligible, and with the great disjunction between his outer self and his inner self, which is fluent." He adds that his mother suffered a stroke, and as he observed her, he wondered if "she was the same inside as she once was outside and just can't get it across to us, or is there an equivalent damage on the inside." As readers of the story, and of Gates in general, will see, the inner voice is the salvation, no matter the damages in the life that surrounds it.
Waiting for What's Next
Although Gates has now fulfilled his contract at Knopf, he d sn't seem all that eager to be shopped around for his next book, and he cites the editing by Fisketjon as key. "Gary is a very serious guy who pays attention to everything from punctuation to overall structure. He is concerned that one character's distinctive turn of phrase d sn't turn up in another character's mouth; in the finished draft of Preston Falls, for example, he had me cut two chapters that seemed to me to be necessary to get the wife from upstate back to Westchester County, and I had worked like a dog over those chapters and they were pretty well done. But Gary said if you want her back in Westchester, just put her in Westchester and get on with it."
As to where to go from here, Gates says, "I don't know that I'd want to be somewhere else just for money I don't need." He is still quite content with his day job at Newsweek, even though his 20-year anniversary approaches. "But," he adds, sounding like one of his narrators at last, "what do I know?"
