Preston Falls [Hardcover]

David Gates (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1998

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Jernigan introduced David Gates as a novelist of the highest order. "Full of dark truths and biting humor,"  wrote Frederick Exley, "a brilliant novel [that] will be read for a long time."

After that blackly comic handbook of self-destruction--whose antihero shoulders up to such crucial American figures as Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Harry Angstrom, Heller's Bob Slocum, Percy's Binx Bolling and Irving's Garp--Gates's new novel investigates the essential truths of a marriage à la mode. Doug and Jean Willis fit the newly classic, recognizable and seemingly normal variety: struggling against a riptide of the daily commute, the mortgages, the latchkey child-rearing and the country house, as well as the hopes and desires from which all of this grew.

In accordance with their long-standing agreement, Doug embarks from their Westchester home on a leave of absence from the PR job that had ineluctably become his life, while Jean contends with both her own job and their two children. Over a two-month period he'll spruce up the family's alternative universe up north in rural Preston Falls; she'll deal with her end of the bargain, and her worries about the survival of the family. But then domesticity hits the brick wall of private longings and nightmarish twists of fate.

A surprising, comic, horrifying and always engrossing novel, charged with the responsibilities of middle age and with the abiding power of love, however disappointed--told with great artistry, pitch-perfect understanding and fierce compassion.

"A novel that's the funniest, sharpest, most strangely exciting book about men and women in a long time."
--Tom Prince, Maxim

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Preston Falls is where Doug Willis goes primarily to unwind from his New York City job but increasingly to escape the pressures of his family life, namely, a wife who has grown weary of his childishness and two angry and frustrated kids with issues Willis can't understand, much less be attentive to. His already strained relationship with his family breaks down when he disappears altogether from their country home. What his family doesn't know is that Willis's increasingly irresponsible behavior has landed him in an improbable situation: acting as drug courier between his hermit neighbor and a local lawyer who specializes in narcotics cases. Gates switches gears in the second half of the book; with Willis gone, his wife Jean juggles the kids and her insecure job while searching for her husband. Oddly, she becomes a hero for just sticking around and making the best of it, something her husband seems unable to do. Gates knows the way families interact and the tiny injuries that accumulate in a marriage over the years, and amid the plot twists lies a sly subtext: children learn by the example of their parents. Highly recommended.
-?Marc Klowzeswki, Indiana Free P.L., Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A sputtering marriage stalls when a p.r. flack takes a break from the job and kids to fix up the family's vacation home in upstate New York, in this painfully slow successor to Gates's debut, Jernigan (1991), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. No one's happy when Willis decides to go on leave: The Manhattan sports-drink company he works for, his wife Jean, and his two children all suspect he's not coming back as planned after two months. And Willis himself is at a loss when he's finally alone in the house in Preston Falls--and, of course, it didn't help that he was arrested in a nearby park, with Jean and the kids looking on, for abusing a workman, and then was thrown into the county lockup for the weekend. Jean doesn't want to hear from him, and his renovations go awry almost immediately. When he seeks solace in the company of a band run by the fox-faced lawyer who got him out of jail, he finds his fingers itch less to play guitar than his nose does to snort the white powder on offer. The lawyer is also a dealer, and when he turns up the heat on his client to do some dirty work--or be framed for possession--Willis panics and vanishes into the night. Only when he's due back home and at work and doesn't show does anyone suspect that something is truly amiss. Jean, juggling a corporate job and the parenting of kids also traumatized by Willis's absence, copes as best she can, but things get worse when their daughter steals a credit card and runs away to find her daddy herself. Jean brings her home safely, and shortly thereafter the prodigal father himself returns. But his homecoming is awkward and uncertain, and it's not long before the wayward Willis is on the road once more. The tumult of marriage on the rocks rings true, but otherwise there's too much yuppie angst and too little human interest for this to be appealing. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679436677
• ISBN-13: 978-0679436676
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,536,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Quintissential Guide to Guys, January 26, 2000

By 

Manny (PhilaPA (not far from the Angstroms)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preston Falls (Hardcover)

I didn't want to read this book. I really didn't. I passed it by dozens of times in the bookstore, reaching for something else instead, a confection when I had the taste for meat. Male angst-again. Updike, Heller, Russo, I've been there, done that. So not again. Not now.

I finally picked it up one day after an hour-long search found me still novel-less. Oh, well. Whatever. Three days later, I put it down.

"Preston Falls" is so gripping, so real, so harrowing, you'll let the phone ring off the hook until you're finished. You want to tell Willis to shape up, do the right thing; but if you're a guy, you know that it wouldn't do any good. I'd write more but I just picked up "Jernigan" and feel the need to get started.

Oh, one more thing: why only four stars you ask? Hey, if I gave the man five, he'd only let me down next time.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The skill of close reading is dead in America, September 12, 1999

By 

[e-mail] - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preston Falls (Hardcover)

Though Gates is very careful to give his readers three of the central epic journeys of Western culture--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and PARSIFAL--against which to judge his ambition for Willis's quest, no one in these reviews seems to have noticed, or tried to understand the import, of these other quests in the text. Are they only ironic commentaries on Willis's fumbling? Or are they intended to signify that Willis, like Christian and Frodo and Parsifal, is a holy fool--albeit of a very late 20th. c. American sort? What are we to make of a world in which, as Champ puts it, "Like what if the Higher Power blew off the weekend?" What ought to be the object of a spiritual quest at this point in human history?

Sure, Willis is self-indulgent, and weak, and terminally ironic. But as he says to Jean, "You're not actually telling me anything about myself I don't know." And the fact that Willis fails in his quest does not make the quest less significant, nor him less honorable (or hilarious). At least he seems to be aware that life ought to be more than a house in Westchester, a job in the City as a p.r. flack, a family complete with dog and Cherokee, and a weekend retreat.

Even Carol, Jean's sister, is aware of all this. But Jean? The character everyone seems to feel sorry for? While she is Willis's utter counterpart, whose caustic judgmental attitude is barely held in check by her kneejerk "in fairness" shtick, she lacks his belief that there is something out there worth finding, something other than--in E.B. White's phrase from "The Second Tree From The Corner"--"a new wing."

When RABBIT, RUN was first published, many readers and critics seemed to miss Harry Angstrom's quest for grace, even though Updike used as part of his epigram "the motions of Grace." Here, Gates uses an epigram from PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, which reads, in part, "...his wife and children...began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, "Life! life! eternal life!" I might have questioned Gates's bluntness. But obviously, he wasn't blunt enough.

While it may be true that Willis isn't someone you'd want to have as a friend--maybe--he, and the other characters, happen to be some of the most acutely self-aware, intelligent, and comic characters who have come our way in a long time.

Read this book. PRESTON FALLS is a masterpiece, dark and ruthless, and utterly lacking in innocence.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Bitterness, June 26, 2000

By 

Veronica Jones - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preston Falls: A Novel (Paperback)

Willis is one of the most compelling characters I have ever encountered. As his marriage crumbles and his children avoid him, he isolates himself so as to be able to concentrate on his bitterness. He dervies so much pleasure from being able to justify his anger, addictions and selfishness that I was actually rooting him on in his quest for self destruction. He has no idea what it is that he really wants from his life, but you can be sure that it's everyone elses fault that he isn't getting it. His indignation at the world and the people in his life is so encompassing, so without personal blame, that rock bottom just doesn't exist for him. He never looks back, not once, and the result is horrifying, but delicious to watch.