These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whom New York magazine anointed “a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever.” A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is populated by characters, young or old or neither, who are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living—or assisted-dying—facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe.
