This time he was on leave from Newsweek when the interviewer called. The Times profiled him too: ‘“Beckett is my main man,” Mr Gates says in his office at Newsweek magazine, where he writes about music and books … He is, he says, “a reluctant writer”, though he doesn’t really know why.’ A second novel, Preston Falls, appeared in 1998 to respectful rather than awestruck reviews a year later a story collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World, went down pretty well. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as a novelist of the very first order’.

Maybe by this time you know the tone I’m talking about?’ In yet another, an ageing actor researching his part in a semi-amateur production of Twelfth Night reads in ‘good old Granville-Barker’: ‘Feste, I feel, is not a young man … There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to.ĭavid Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. In another story, a magazine journalist mentions that he’s ‘taken to smoking weed’ while setting down the words we’re reading – ‘can you tell?’ In another, a small-time columnist with ‘a computer infested with miscarried books’ makes the mistake of looking her work over while stoned: ‘I was too high to follow from the beginning of a sentence to the end, but the falseness and glibness revealed itself so plainly that I couldn’t bring myself to write the next day. ‘A s I tell my students, if you’re not at a creative impasse, you’re not paying attention,’ the stalled composer who narrates one of the stories in A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me says.

Jernigan by David Gates