The Gates by Chuck WachtelLoveliness of the Local One of the pleasures of living in Manhattan is experiencing the place interpreted by various artists. The detective novels of Lawrence Sanders and Lawrence Block are delightful for bringing us along to joints and interiors that many of us have passed by a hundred times. Kojak was a great TV show for driving us around the neighborhoods. The Gates zooms in on one of those neighborhoods, the East Village, to portray the less sensational aspects of the neighborhood, subject matter few writers dare to take on. Chuck Wachtel luxuriates in the particulars: the chance encounter with a neighbor who asks about his ex, the longevity of a display in a shop window, the comfortable familiarity of a short-order cook. The Gates, for the most part, is a quiet novel whose protagonist reflects on the world and the ordinary events he's taking part in, block by block. The Gates lacks the fluidity of an action novel where plot builds toward a climax and seams smooth out through the unfolding of a central action. Instead of pursuit with an ultimate success, we're given a different sort of pleasure: the pleasure of writing. The first long segment of the book, for example, is free of any plot-driven baggage. As Primo Thomas settles himself back into the city after a period away teaching, the activity of the neighborhood washes over him. A simple look around becomes an act of sensuality. In these moments, Wachtel is a poet pronouncing the glory of the ordinary, startling you with the freshness of plain description. We see afresh the tiny dramas of a common day that intertwine and accent each other, certain paragraphs ending at a point that leave us suspended with a thought, like a freeze-frame. As with his excellent first novel, Joe the Engineer, Wachtel writes here about characters of the working class with empathy and familiarity. The Gates breaks down into incidents: anecdotes, a voyage and a central romance. Wachtel is at his best when he's depicting intimacy. Those moments when Primo is engaged one-on-one with an aunt, a bartender, a neighbor, a drinking buddy in Managua, and each of three lovers, are the most believable and the most fun in the novel. When Wachtel/Primo attempts to expose conditions in Nicaragua or a factory in Brooklyn where illegal immigrants, including a girlfriend, are being exploited, the righteousness of his cause dilutes the marvelous tone he achieves in the more domestic sequences. Wachtel deserves credit for stretching his personal identity in making his protagonist bi-racial: Italian-American mother, African-American father. Primo Thomas is more integrated into society than his literary ancestor Native Son's Bigger Thomas ever was. The Gates is not about Primo's rage at being excluded because of his skin color. His racial status is a factor in his sense of being untethered, but a grand achievement of the novel is that Primo's bouts with assimilation don't undermine his sense of self-worth. His struggle is not against society's insistence on excluding him from the fruits of a capitalist system. Forty-five years after the Invisible Man was sucking in toxic fumes while mixing white paint, Primo works for the betterment of society as an English-as-a-second-language instructor. He's grounded enough to have an ex who sends him poems. It's not as funny as Roseanne, The Simpsons, or Roc, but as in those shows the characters in The Gates don't pretend to be something that they're not. It doesn't offer up fairy tale dreams as a fantasy salvation. Wachtel descends into the typing pool with the rest of us, to write of the struggles and successes we each have in common, as humans facing new arrangements of circumstances every next moment. (unpublished) |