Preston Falls - Softcover

David Gates

3.65

612 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575403179 ISBN 13: 9780575403178

Publisher: Orion Pub Co, 2000

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The answer to Doug Willis' mid-life crisis is a sabbatical at his rural retreat in Preston Falls, two months spent restoring the faded splendour of the farmhouse, reading Dickens in the evening and watching summer gently fade to autumn. But following a marathon whiskey drinking session, a disastrous attempt to tear out the living room ceiling and an incident with a sheriff at a local campsite, Willis ends his first weekend away in jail, and it's clear the wired, burned-out New York copy-writer within is still very much to the fore. And while Willis' wife Jean struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, sceptical kids, Willis' 'break' crumbles into Dewars- and Cocaine-fuelled disarray, and he embarks on another kind of journey altogether.

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From the Publisher:

"David Gates has a superb reporter's precision, an analyst's ear, a teenager's glee in exposing deception and a moralist's eye that is as unforgiving as Evelyn Waugh's."--New York Times Book Review

"A blistering marriage in free fall, Preston Falls is full of black humor."--Newsweek

"David Gates has produced the funniest, sharpest, most strangely exciting novel about men and women in a long time."--Maxim

"[Preston Falls] abounds with excellent peripheral characters, engaging imagery, deft style, skilled detail and humorous interludes."--The Rocky Mountain News

"It's very well done, with dialogue that rings true and all the accumulated nastiness that erupts as families disintegrate."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Preston Falls is mesmerizing, disturbing, a brilliantly overheard monologue--the nada of a man who has been there, done that, and is out of places to go."--The Boston Globe

"Gates is a masterful chronicler of the dynamics of a family meltdown."--Publisher's Weekly

From the Inside Flap:

or 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 � 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 c

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