Customer Reviews

Preston Falls: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Reading Preston Falls is like having one of those nightmares that you can't explain to your friends why it upset you so much -- where the look of things in the dream is ordinary, but the atmosphere is somehow sickeningly heavy and hopeless -- nastiness veiling nothingness.

It's a meticulous and unmerciful sociological cataloging of what happens to both men and women when, as Joseph Campbell says, their culture has become bereft of any larger spiritual or communal context -- when the normal life for both males and females is deeply unsatisfying.

Men like Willis still try, though, to be un-ordinary, to be true to some undefined but deeply longed-for meaning, to rise above the ordinary, to fix the sterile and unsatisfying cosmos that holds no God by becoming a god, or at least an existential hero -- which turns out to be a pretty impossible assignment even for someone with considerable talent and intelligence, like Willis.

The story is all too familiar, and the details unerringly reported: the crumbling country home, the unsatisfying job, the marital sniping, the sullen children. Willis, like everybody you know, has his midlife crisis. He gives up on his marriage and job. He drops out to "find himself". He goes back to nature. He tries being an archetypal male, working with his hands; he tries to find a deep place for his dissatisfied soul in the music that stirred him when he was young. But predictably, there's no there there. Stripped even of the exigencies of middle class life that at least kept him marching along in the culture, now all he has to work with is his own petty, frightened, undisciplined, irritable, human nature which, aided by cocaine, soon lets him drop, without fanfare, into a chaotic hell.

Meanwhile the woman (Jean) is still marching along --struck in purgatory - with the entire burden of the ordinary on her shoulders. Which is more than HER imperfect, fussy human nature can bear, either. Her desperate clutches at compassion and hope and family in a world whose "center does not hold" are especially heartbreaking in the portrayal of the two kids, the boy and the girl, who are clearly on their way to lives just like their parents.

Who suffers more, the drop-out man or the uptight woman? It's a moot point. However, in this book, despite her annoying rigidity, the women, Jean, comes out as more sympathetic. Makes you wonder what deep guilt or anger led the author to punish his hero so as to portray him as totally undeserving of mercy or compassion. It's a pretty hard sentence.

Preston Falls was an easy read that probably deserves at least one more star. However, the main character and his motives are so underdeveloped that I didn't only not know who he really was, but I didn't care. The author paints a picture of a unconvincing mid-life crisis, a marriage that I couldn't figure out from the start, and a caricature of a dysfunctional family. The writing is fine, the story is not.

This is the kind of book that you want to wash your hands after reading. The male characters are really effective portrayals of quite despicable people. After a while, no matter how well written, it just gets tedious and you want to ...well, wash your hands! If many people in N. America are like these characters, we're in big trouble, and let me just say, the West has already declined. Who really wants to read about people like these? Willis is perfectly drawn as a most detestable person. As another reader wrote: don't bother with it.

I thought this book was extremely well-written and Gates does have an ear for language. The characters were a bit sketchy and don't read this if you're looking for lots of plot. It is a character study and a look at the effects that a disintegrating marriage has on everybody. It's a little depressing, but well worth the investment of time.

I read it on the subway, during meals, before bed, when i woke up. I loved it! My only problem with the book is the wife character. What a pill!

After only a couple chapters of Preston Falls, the reader realizes that Mr. Gates accomplishes what few authors are able to: he depicts the fears, insecurities, and frustrations that we all have and does so in a believable way. Often, I found his observations to be omnisciently accurate. For example, when the middle-aged protagonist is about to snort a few lines of blow with his guitar-playing pseudo-scumbag buddies, thereby symbolically snapping the fraying strings which are attaching him to his unsatisfying family life, the author describes how Willis is feeling about recapturing his youth in such a recklessly taboo fashion: "Suddenly he feels like he has to s---: the excitement of being bad"(p.102). Until I read this, I was under the impression that I was the only human alive who felt the almost unrestrainable need to relieve my bowels as I was about to do something naughty (something I first experienced when I held a match to a cigarette in the back yard with my adolescent friends). Mr. Gates fills his book with countless keen observations like this. His character development combines elements of John Irving and Nicholson Baker, and his dialogue is believable and easy-flowing about 95% of the time. The only thing which may have been a bit ovedone was Jean's super goody-goodyness (For God's sake, Ms. Willis, it's alright if your nine-year-old son uses the word "suck"!). But as a whole, Doug Willis, Jean, Reed, Calvin, and Champ are complex and imaginative (yet plausible) characters, who are as predictable and unpredictable as we all can be. This is a quick book to read and well worth it. But warning. . .it's hard to put down!

I utterly agree with the most recent poster's assessment of this book--it is dark, funny and ruthless--and the decline of reading skills in America. In some regards, people's lack of knowledge of the stories in the books that Willis reads helps matters in some way--for me at least. While I can't pretend to have known about all the books Willis reads, I do know that Mr. Gates has probably read them and is putting them in the story for a reason. But, because I haven't read them, I can't draw the an ironic connection between Willis reading these books--and maybe that's a good thing. Because I don't know about these books then I'm not thinking about how I'm reading a book about a man who's on a quest who's reading books about going on a quest (follow me?) and thus I'm not distracted by this fact or the author's reading list. To me, knowing the books' histories is the secret prize at the bottom of the Crackerjack box. If you know those books, fine. If not, admire the witty repartee and other things throughout.

And you should read this book because it is funny, wise, dead-on, imaginative, inventive, up-to-the-minute, hip, ironic, tragic, sexy, goofy, and sad. It is a book that has Public Enemy and Charles Dickens. Illicit drugs and making fun of NPR. It is a book that explains the secrets Keith Richards' guitar. And it features a cameo by the Land O' Lakes Indian woman and the wonderful knee trick that you can do on your very own box of butter. (If you haven't seen this or know about this, well, it is truly as Willis says, about the funniest thing, ever.) Any book, any modern book, that has all of these things plus some of the best dialogue around and, to boot, tackles the weighty subject of what modern man is to do now that we're so smart yet still so human thus doomed by our knowledge that we will always and forever be human--deep breath--well, this book deserves wide admiration and adulation. Act now, supplies limited! Plus, it's a Guy Book. So men should read this and will probably love this more than women. (And one thing is not mutually exclusive to the other.)

Plus, his short story collection "The Wonders of the Invisible World" ain't bad either. In fact, it's great too. But "Preston Falls" is the Big Important Book that everyone should read. And remember.