How David Gates Slow Cooks Great Stories - Daily Beast
American writers—like other Americans who work in office cubicles and hospitals, in factories and on farms—are under constant pressure to work harder, work longer, produce more. ) Brand-name genre writers like Lee Child and David Baldacci produce a book or two every year, like clockwork, to feed the beast. Gates has just come out with his first book in 16 years, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me , a collection of one novella and 11 short stories. In addition to being full of Gates’s laser prose, his pitch-perfect dialogue, and his usual wised-up, broken-down, unmoored characters, this book is a testament to the benefits of slow cooking in an age of flash-fried, microwaved fiction. Gates, now 68, was a late bloomer, publishing his first novel when he was in his 40s. Jernigan , an acidic first-person tale of an alcoholic trying to deal with his wife’s death and his life’s aimlessness in the New Jersey suburbs, was a finalist... Gates followed it seven years later with another novel, Preston Falls , a portrait of an unraveling marriage told in the shifting third-person, from the points of view of the feckless husband, Willis, and his aggrieved wife, Jean. That novel was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the passages told from the woman’s point of view marked a major step forward. A year later, Gates came. Source: www.thedailybeast.com
