Many claims have been made for David Gates and few of them are justified in this loud collection in which most of his self-destruct characters are not so much at the edge but have obviously already jumped off. In the best of the stories Vigil, an ageing father, describes his efforts to help in the aftermath of his married daughter's car crash. It is not easy, particularly as it appears she had been leaving the scene of a hotel assignation and her husband is far angrier with his injured spouse than upset by her injuries. The mild narrator also has to contend with the arrival of his alcoholic former wife, long happily married to another. Elsewhere a dope fiend husband and son has taken to his dead mother's wheelchair while his father, no longer needed as a nurse, may have gone crazy. The wife and daughter-in-law is having her own problems with an affair she doesn't want but needs. The hip prose is aggressive, the dialogue so snappy it is brittle, no one trusts anyone and the Waltons it ain't. Optimistically hailed on the blurb as "the best collection of short stories to come out of America since Richard Ford's Rock Springs". Mmm; the publishers must not have read Annie Proulx, John Updike, Tobias Wolff, Richard Bausch, William Maxwell, Russell Banks and Co. Gates, author of Jernigan and Preston Falls, also has his moments here, but is far closer to Jay McInerney than he looks like ever being to Ford or Cheever.
