These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whom New York magazine anointed “a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.” A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young or old or neither, who are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human parents in assisted-living—or assisted-dying—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. Terrifyingly self-aware, they refuse to go gently—even when they’re going nowhere fast, in settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast to the countryside of upstate New York and New England. Relentlessly inventive, alternately hilarious and tragic, always moving, this book proves yet again that Gates is one of our most talented, witty and emotionally intelligent writers.
Author
David Gates (born January 8, 1947) is an American journalist and novelist. His first novel, Jernigan (1991), about a dysfunctional one-parent family, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This was followed by a second novel, Preston Falls (1998), and two short story collections, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1999) and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me (2015). He has published short stories in The New Yorker, Tin House, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, H.O.W, The Oxford American, The Journal of Country Music, Esquire magazine, Ploughshares, GQ, Grand Street, TriQuarterly, and The Paris Review. Gates is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Until 2008, he was a senior writer and editor in the Arts section at Newsweek magazine, specializing in articles on books and music. He teaches in the graduate writing program at The University of Montana as well as at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Here he is a member of the Dog House Band, performing on the guitar, pedal steel, and vocals.
