A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me - David Gates

Published to coincide with the re-release of David Gates’s Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted novel Jernigan, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a collection of meditative short stories which explore the decline of America’s lineral middle class. Elegiac, bitter and ironic in tone, the stories are beautifully crafted, but the collection as a whole suffers from a lack of variation.

The highpoint of the collection is Banishment, a novella-length piece which tells the story of a young journalist who leaves her first husband to marry an older architect who she meets whilst conducting an interview. The architect is a relic of liberal, arts-loving America, a man with designs to build beautiful civic structures, but who finds himself increasingly sidelined. If the American Dream can be characterised as the desire to own property and start a family, the architect can provide his new wife with the former, but not the latter. He has a daughter by a previous marriage, but their relationship is utterly dysfunctional – a comment on the mutual lack of understanding and trust between the liberals who lived through the Sixties, and their modern day counterparts. His reproductive woes are contrasted with the journalist’s brother, a born-again Christian who swiftly fathers four children.

The journalist has a nice line in snark (‘My writer was mentoring another female researcher too... a couple of evenings a week he'd come to my apartment straight from his office and give me a good mentoring, with a scarf tied around my ankles,’), and Gates makes an effort to inhabit his character’s body as much as he does her mind. Ultimately, though, this is a story about a generation which failed to live up to its promise: ‘damaged and selfless people, the waste of money that could have helped somebody, the waste of gifts that could have given somebody pleasure'. The architect attempts to create some sort of legacy by building a home for the woman he assumes will become his widow, but is generally content to slide into obscurity, passing his days painting in his studio, and drinking. Throughout A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, Gates will examine the toxic effects of disappointment on men of his generation and their strategies for coping.

Generally, these strategies involve alcohol and adultery: Performing for You, The Curse of the Davenports and Alcorian A-1949 all involve male protagonists who suffer personal and professional humiliation as a consequence of chasing younger women. Again, each story is impressive, judged in isolation: it is only repetition which dulls the effects. The Curse of the Davenports is a particular highlight. While the set-up is  familiar (‘the traditional academic scandal’), the mixture of fear and contempt for his past that motivates the narrator, who is scared of turning into a ‘swamp-Yankee’ like his Granddad, and the disconcerting relationship between his son Seth and a troubled 14 year old girl, add a pleasingly disturbing quality. The Miltonic undertones of Desecrators, about a man who ruins his perfectly good marriage for a short affair on the grounds of ‘better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’, offer another highlight.

A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is littered with academics, actors and artists, and references to Talking Heads, Samuel Beckett and Naomi Wolf are scattered liberally across the pages. The overall effect is wearing: there is only so much time one wishes to spend with disillusioned old men, after all. This is a shame, as the writing is finely crafted, and there are plenty of nice riffs, such as the Dylan covers band who change all the pronouns in the lyrics, and the ageing doctor who uses the name Kaspar Hauser to collect his prescriptions. In stories like Banishment, the sense of resignation is linked to wider societal themes, and leavened by self-destructive irony, but there needs to be more variety of tone and setting. Any one of these stories, on its own, would be a treat: as a collection, they are sadly a bit of a chore.