HE WOULD PREFER NOT TO

IN DAVID GATES'S SECOND NOVEL, THE PROBLEM OF LIFE APPEARS TO BE THE INABILITY TO FEEL, ENJOY, OR CARE

Author: By Rosellen Brown

Date: SUNDAY, February 1, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

This, the ennui of the superintelligent, understandably makes him too impatient with just about everything and everyone to allow himself much pleasure. Pleasure, for those gauche enough to feel it, is an emotion characterized by earnestness, the capacity to stop judging long enough to feel; it demands a measure of trust that Willis is just slightly, helplessly, too smart for. In a stroke of superb gallows humor, Willis's computer features a screen-saver that plays, endlessly, Beckett's ``I can't go on I'll go on.'' Willis, like Jernigan, is trapped in a life-denying yawn, though whether his angst is personal, existential, or something slightly less cosmic is never entirely clear.

The story is very simple and is not what a reader will come to Gates's novel for. Willis, his wife, Jean, and their two children, 12-year-old Mel and 9-year-old Roger, are driving from New York's Westchester County to their country house in Preston Falls, Vt., where Willis intends to spend a few months in self-imposed retreat from what he calls (uncharacteristically without irony) ``the wrong life.'' He is trapped, or so he sees it, writing publicity copy for a beverage company, whose banal demands surface here only in the fragmentary conversations and e-mail exchanges from work that follow him to his retreat.

En route to his time-out, Willis's intemperate attitude -- he is nothing if not attitude, like a teenager looking for a fight who can never figure out why he gets his nose bloodied -- gets him in trouble with the police. Before he knows what's happening, he's been carted off to jail, and has fallen in with a long-haired lawyer who can spring him neatly and apparently without much fuss or expense, can invite him to bring his guitar and jam with a gang of other unyouthful rockers, all of them, like Willis, casually druggy. Finally, the lawyer can embroil him -- innocent Willis is slow to suspect how he's being used -- in some drug delivery shenanigans from which, by then, he can't escape.

This is not the holiday from care he has had in mind. It becomes prudent, both emotionally and practically, to drop out of sight for a while. And who can tell, given Willis's inflamed state of mind, if this will be permanent or (his father was a suicide) even life-threatening. The point of view shifts to Jean, his desperate wife, whose job, children, marriage, are all running out on her at the same time. (She ``sees Willis sitting out on the stepstone with his back to her. Feeling lonely and misunderstood. Or sensing his own insignificance in the vastness of the universe. Or planning how he's going to dump her. Or wondering whether to buy a motorcycle or another guitar. Really, at this point, how would anybody know?'') Only after his disappearance, this exasperating, self-indulgent, chauvinistic, bewildered, smart-ass Willis turns out, though it hardly seems likely, to have made a claim on our concern. It does matter, in spite of his every alienating habit, whether he has finally crashed and burned or is limping his way to some kind of salvation, like an animal caught in a trap who has gnawed off his paw to get free.

Gates takes it for granted that it's clear how awful Willis's life is, this suburban prisoner of a paycheck who's frittering away his life in an asinine job for the sake of a wife and children who barely register on his consciousness. To judge from what passes for repartee, not to mention loyalty and morality, at Dandineau Beverages and at Jean's job as a graphic designer, one's sympathy is all theirs. On the other hand, why Willis is so profoundly stuck is never sufficiently clear. It's never fair to want to whisper to a character that he ought to pull up his socks and do something with his life, but a richer sense of the inescapability of Willis's destiny as an overqualified jingle-maker could have made him a more sympathetic icon of our day. It doesn't occur to a reader to tell Ivan Ilyich or Gregor Samsa or Bartleby that changing jobs might make getting up in the morning more tolerable. Yet I kept imagining Willis in pursuit of work he might not find so readily contemptible. Is his anomie so strong it would conquer anything he put his hand to? Probably, but it's hard to say.

He does have a few enthusiasms: His literary taste leads him to spend his downtime reading Dickens, but that's strictly nonprofessional. And in his only tonal lapse, Gates inflates the tragedy of Willis's fate by decorating it with extra levels of allusion far less organic than the Beckett. He gives us lashings of Pilgrim's Progress and the Slough of Despond -- ``The Dark Ages are upon us,'' says an old back-country bookseller, as if he's been handed a script for an end-of-the-millennium rant.

``Preston Falls,'' for all its piercingly acute insight, is all voice and what they're calling in Hollywood these days ``product placement.'' Gates does Jean well and his mastery of domestic detail is stunning, but she's much less complex and disturbing than Willis, which makes her, or whatever else may be failing her, a lucky woman. But Willis's rhythms are like a foot that can't stop jiggling. They're the perfectly annotated slightly out-of-control frenzy of a man who can't feel anything that he hasn't already imagined himself to the end of and past.

Though the narrative is of a very different sort, Gates's intentions remind me of Donald Barthelme's. He even has Willis call himself a ``many-minded'' man; Barthelme liked to speak of being ``double-minded.'' Both recognize how language, not to mention sensation, are dog-eared with use and misuse; how nearly impossible it is to feel anything freshly so late in the game. Barthelme didn't locate the problem in the individual but rather in society's psyche, bought and sold a few times too many. Gates, apportioning the blame equally, spreads the blight around: ``He just feels sort of out there.''

Provocative though he may be, we do come to pity Willis this lostness, wherever the responsibility lies. Imagine a man who ``sometimes takes the batteries out of the smoke detectors and opens the doors of both woodstoves just to keep that smell intense, which he knows is like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess. But hey. And now winter's rolling around again.'' He needs the sensation, feels it, mocks it. He may even be sentimental at his deeply-buried center. ``Preston Falls'' is mesmerizing, disturbing, a brilliantly overheard monologue -- the nada of a man who's been there, done that, and is out of places to go.