by David Gates
First published 2000
Manhattan professionals stumble through their carefully constructed lives, armed with graduate degrees and crippling self-awareness. A woman dissects her marriage while her husband retreats into alcohol. A man abandons his corporate job to chase fantasies of country living, only to discover that geography cannot cure what ails him. Another character medicates his anxiety with substances that promise relief but deliver only new problems. These men and women possess the vocabulary to analyze their failures but lack the tools to fix them. They oscillate between the concrete reality of city life and romantic visions of rural escape that remain perpetually out of reach. Each story captures a moment when the facade crumbles, revealing the desperate bargains people make to continue functioning. Gates writes with sharp wit about characters who think too much and feel too little, trapped by their own intelligence in cycles of disappointment and minor self-destruction.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Manhattan
Period: 21st-century
272 pages · Paperback · Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Content warnings: alcohol-abuse, mental-illness, substance-abuse