A brilliant collection of stories, which illuminate with unflinching vision and hard-earned compassion a great variety of lives. In 'Star Baby' a gay man leaves the big city for life in his hometown, only to find himself cast as a father figure to his detoxing sister's young son ('Mostly he avoids taking Deke to restaurants, not because of the catamite issue but because the two of them look so alone in the world.'); In 'The Crazy Thought' a woman chafes at life after the departure of the husband she never imagined leaving her (' ''Nothing wrong with John Le Carre,'' Paul said. 'I'd hell of a lot sooner read him than fucking John Updike. If we're talking about Johns here.'''); and in the title story an embittered dean loses his wife, child, and student lover ('I took out The Portable Blake. Holding it up to read meant exposing my fraying cuffs. But I'd be straphanging any minute now, so what the fuck. And what the fuck anyway.').
Often bleak but always funny, usually centring around disintegrating relationships but covering the broad sweep of contemporary life in America, David Gates, in The Wonders of the Invisible World, has written the best collection of short stories to come out of America since Richard Ford's Rock Springs.
