Book review: Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

ON the morning I was to be married for the second time, I found myself going to my knees in the shower and praying: that my ex-husband would find love again ...” 

David Gates

Serpent’s Tail, €18.20

So starts the novella, ‘Banished’, which opens this collection of stories. As well as alerting the reader to the protagonist’s gender, it marks a gesture of sincerity that’s as rare for this character as it is short-lived. She continues: ‘Just one of those maudlin premenstrual moments; I suppose the wedding could have been better timed.’

While David Gates’ style is different, the tone edgier, he shares Richard Ford’s understanding of the self-desctructive aspects of human nature. Banishment is the first person narration of a Yale graduate who once worked at Newsweek and whose subsequent jobs never again reach that glory.

She is still married (to a man whom she lured away from the ‘nice girl’ he’d been seeing, ‘ just because I can’) when she meets a wealthy architect in his 60s whom she is sent to interview.

During their conversation — he’s a sophisticated, erudite, intriguing man — an attraction develops. The architect invites her to live with him. ‘It’s a big house. You wouldn’t have to sleep anywhere you didn’t want to.’

His seduction of her is more pragmatic than romantic. About to embark on their first night together, he says, ‘I’m probably good for about once, so we should make this count.’

Though it’s interesting when a male author uses a female first person narrator, I wasn’t sure I believed the often callous, scornful woman’s voice here. (When her parents are about to tell her new husband a story about her as a child, she asks ‘Is this going to be touching?’)

Nevertheless, though an opportunistic, selfish, unlikeable person, she is compelling. Gates’ strengths are sharp, witty dialogue, sexual tension and subtlety. Also, a non-judgmental tone, even when his characters do something devastatingly cruel.

One story after another features an older man and a young woman. In ‘Performing for You’, an ageing ex golden-boy actor is in last chance saloon, when a 21-year-old comes on to him. In ‘The Curse of the Davenports’, a divorced father whose turn it is to spend the weekend with his teenage son has to contend with the boy’s 14-year-old runaway girlfriend.

In ‘A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me’, ‘Paul Thompson always turned up with his mandolin, some good weed and a younger woman, never the same one twice.’

Born in 1947, a former Newsweek writer/editor, Montana University lecturer and band musician, Gates is clearly drawing on autobigraphical material. But in spite of the undeniably authentic ring, the jaded knowingness of the characters can pall after a while.

You get the feeling you’re being told each story by a friend: ‘The first time I actually saw him he was onstage, wearing a full-length plaster on his — give me a second to visualize this — on his left leg’.

In each story, we witness humanity in their weakest, most shameful moments: ‘I went back to working...until — God, must we? Until I was able to sell my father’s house’ (A Hand Reached Down). I suspect it is this — shall we call it courage? — that attracts readers.

Ultimately, Gates seems to be suggesting that, as we approach the looming reality of our mortality, kindness is what will save us: ‘I’d made peace with her chubby knees, as she’d presumably made peace with my loose belly and my too-small hands.’ This is Gates’ skill. That recognition a reader feels, and goes, ‘yes. Exactly.’