Reading Is A Home Wrecker

(preston falls)/david gates



so, preston falls. or is it the much ballyhooed (?) jernigan? wait, no, it's preston falls. i think.

one of the very wonderful things about checking stuff out of public libraries, as opposed to buying them in new or near new condition is that you come across all sorts of dubious, mangled, generally confounding copies of otherwise legitimate books. like the time i found a piece of over-charred bacon in sinclair's the jungle, probably used as a book mark by some irony-blind buffoon.

or the curious copy of harold jaffe's sex for the millennium i checked out of san diego central, for (a more actual) example. while it was a legitimate, non-bootlegged print, complete with red, black and white cover illustration (quintessential jaffe), half the damn pages in the thing had been replaced by photocopies. and not good quality ones either. these were no-foolin' sheets of typing paper, with washed-out, raspy text inserted (not stapled, or glued, or taped or in any other way affixed, mind you) where the originals had been inexplicably removed. why did fifty percent of this book up and die, leaving behind a crudely photocopied ghost of itself? why remove and then keep these pages long enough to copy and loosely replace them, as opposed to, say, doing nothing and just leaving the originals to dangle as they may? a mystery indeed.



as is the san diego library's copy of david gates's preston falls. i'm pretty sure this book is a not-meant-for-distribution, promotional copy, which, while a little ghetto, is understandable, considering the increasingly abysmal state of library funding, here in sd and abroad. what's confusing is that, aside from the title, not a single thing written anywhere on the book's jacket (and there's a hell of a lot of laudatory verbage to be had) even glancingly refers to preston falls. instead, the front and back covers are crowded with praise for jernigan, a different david gates book. different as in not the book i'm holding in my hand, staring at in a confused stupor, but a whole other literary, physical entity, somewhere else, far, far away, that has next to nothing to do with preston falls. and i can understand why the publishers would want to hype the almost-pulitzer-winning jernigan. it's a better book. but why didn't this version of preston falls have even the slightest thing to say about preston falls, if only as an indication that it is indeed not jernigan, and, if not gate's finest, at least something more than a billboard for what i should implicitly be reading instead.?



anyway.

preston falls chronicles the tail end of the collapse of a white, semi-upper middle class family, wiling away their lives in the (sub)urban ecosystem and upstate savage lands of ny state. all of gates' trademark themes are present: a distant, self absorbed father figure; eccentric, largely ineffectual grandparents whose own parental incompetence is the reason for dad's piss-poorness; inaccessible, already hardened kids; self destruction; a grossly heightened sense of class and self consciousness; the intellectual guilt of someone too well read, and the absurdity of romanticizing the everyday struggle of america's contemporary poor; substance abuse + ROCK N' ROLL, and how that's played out; masculinity, and all that.

in a nutshell, willis, the father, under the pretense of renovating his country house in the sketchy podunk town of preston falls (possibly a real place?), escapes his family and ditches his cushy pr job, finds out he can't fix a house, gets into a smidgen of trouble, falls in with the bad kids, and then things finish falling to hell from there, even if hell is a bit excessive.

in a lot of ways, its a relatively ordinary story that i'm sure a fair share of people could relate to, but it's annoying in a way, because these people would all be spoiled new yorkers. but this is largely the point, and these same new yorkers are probably supposed to feel a little bad, or at least self reflective, but most likely won't.

admirably, gates' tries to prevent this book from being a whine about yuppie family dissolution, and the desiccated life that too much education and job security brings by making his central characters extremely self critical, and painfully aware of their stations in life. to an extent he's successful, illustrating the complex, unstable, often blurred relationship between the poor and the reasonably well off, as well as the questionable rationals and misunderstandings which inform this relationship. this is most evident and successful in willis' interactions with his filthy, criminal hick neighbor calvin, who turns out to be more street wise than doughy, book learned willis bargains for.



but mostly this hyper self awareness comes off as both irritating and baffling. the reader often has to observe willis reading his life away when he should be living out his myth of the man of concrete action, and then bemoaning the fact that there's nothing worse than being a word man, and snorting a bunch of coke over it. what it is is he's a moderately successful college boy, ruing his own accomplishment and suffering because of it, and you just want to shake him, but not really, because you don't really know why he's dissatisfied to begin with, and don't think a throttling will make much difference. and while the point seems to be that it's no longer possible to just appreciate what you have because it's never what you want, and you might not deserve it anyway, anymore than anyone else, this is exactly the point that would be reached by so many moderately successful college boy (and girl) readers.

ultimately, preston falls seems only to further fetishize and pay lip service to the class politics which, like patently atrocious mexican food, are all the rage over on the east coast, more of a long standing institution than a pressing socio-economic concern. and it's just so... caucasian, upper middle class. at the same time i get the sense that gates, who also works as a music critic, is acknowledging a chip that many writery folk have on their shoulders, over being writers, as opposed to something more useful or dynamic, like brick layers, or guitarists, or the blueman group. poppycock, i say.



but this is beginning to sound all negative. i liked preston falls, its well written, and the dialogue is both naturalistic and snappy, straddling the fence between flowing, everyday communication and charming, tv show banter. especially nice is the short conversation between willis and his pr boss. and while the aforementioned, mental self critique in which willis and co. constantly engage can be irritating, it also works nicely at the level of style and as a narrative device, adding a great deal of insight, dimension, and cleverness.

Further, while it's a serious book, about familial implosion, it's also pretty funny, and, in it's way, highly understated, in the sense that nothing too extraordinary or life shattering occurs. indeed, there are moments in the plot when you expect something tragic/catastrophic/highly legally and morally criminal to occur, but which, thankfully, doesn't, as gates opts for something more likely. this isn't a tour de force but a more introspective, measured portrait of a dissolution a lot of people are familiar with but can't quite explain. SPOILER ALERT: no one dies in this book. SPOILER ALERT: not much of anything actually happens. and that's alright.

in the end, preston falls is a very decent way to let time pass you by, and is a pretty good introduction to gates' writing.

inspired by the non-promotion for this book,i'm going to end off by saying that preston falls really isn't jernigan, and, in a lot of ways, the former seems like it was just a kind of practice for the latter. i don't know for sure, and i'm not about to spend the many multiple seconds required to confirm this via the internet, but i think jernigan was written and published subsequent to preston falls. this would make a lot of sense, anyway. relative to peter jernigan (titular character of jernigan, obviously), willis is rather opaque, unlikeable, and unsympathetic, not necessarily because theses are his inherent traits, but because his development is just more shallow. sure, they're both assholes who let their families grow to hate them, but jernigan just has more depth and facets so that you can kind of see where he's at least slightly a victim of circumstance, that he wants things to have turned out better. more importantly, you can have an opinion about jernigan, one way or the other, there's enough room and ambiguity there in his depiction. with willis, and everyone else in his family, its all programmed up front (or at least more so), and you get the sense that these people are caricatured types, a little like watching melrose place. willis is a selfish asshole, just because. ok, he had a crazy dad, but this is mentioned in passing, and so what? there's something more flat about the character of willis. maybe jernigan is just more of a charming drunk than willis is a charming, relapsed coke addict. this isn't to say that the impenetrability of willis is better or worse. in a lot of ways its appropriate. just different, is all.

so, read this book. or jernigan. or the wonders of the invisible world (not the cotton mather version). i know i did.