A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is David Gates's first book of fiction in 15 years, and once again he mines the same rich lode of broken (or at best, bent) lives beneath the surface of New England professionals and academics. In story after story, musicians, doctors, architects and especially journalists descend into drink, divorce and promiscuity. They are getting old, and their careers and dreams have long passed. Sounds bleak, but over the years Gates has honed his sense of irony and sad humor. His characters' smart, often sarcastic dialogue reflects the hard-earned knowledge of people approaching the end.
Perhaps because its length gives Gates room to turn snapshots into a panorama, the opening novella, "Banishment," is the best piece. Its narrator is a snarky, on-again, off-again journalist who took an entry-level job at a Hudson Valley newspaper and married an earnest colleague. She leaves her first husband to marry an architect in his 70s, despite his warning that "things could get a little unattractive in the homestretch." She later leaves him for a surprising new sexual partner and a job at an even lower tier news outlet. Like most of Gates's stories, "Banishment" doesn't conclude so much as just end.
In "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me," the narrator, who accepts his dying friend's request to take him in and nurse him through his final days, comments, "I don't know what to hope for.... Quality, I guess. And then not too much quantity." Whatever Gates's oeuvre might lack in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.