I had never heard of David Gates or his collection of short stories before a neighbor loaned me this book a few years ago. It sat on my shelf until this year’s resolution to read and return all the books that have been loaned to me over the years. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my neighbor will no doubt ask me about it when I finally return her book, I would have bailed on this one without finishing it. Thank the goddess it was short!
I hated every, single one of these characters.
As near as I can tell, the common theme running through this book is that all the stories seem to center on middle-class white people who are all miserable for no apparent reason. They treat each other like shit because they’re miserable, and the cycle continues.
There are a lot of spouses cheating on each other in these stories, and when they’re not cheating on each other, they’re staying in relationships with people they can barely stand for no apparent reason. None of these people are wealthy, but none of them are poor, either. It’s not like they don’t have options. It’s just that they’re too lazy to seek out other options and/or they think the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t know (which is such a stupid saying). So they just hang out in this relationship that isn’t going anywhere (that, in some cases, is actually moving backwards), and just pretend that they’re OK with that being their life … except for the stories where they wait around until their partner cheats on them and leaves.
There were a couple stories that seemed to be on the brink of having a real conversation about depression, but Gates doesn’t appear to be equipped to deal seriously with mental illness. His characters could see a psychiatrist, could get a prescription for anti-depressants, but no. He’d rather leave them listless without even bothering to describe what a struggle depression really is. How hard it can be just to drag yourself out of bed when there never seems to be any point. He makes it out like their misery is a choice, but when is misery ever a choice? There are self-destructive people out there, don’t get me wrong, but most of them are self-destructive because they’re dealing with some sort of mental illness and a book that grapples with that would have been much better than this waste of my time.
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