Preston Falls - Tapa dura

The lives of Doug Willis, his wife, and their son and daughter spin wildly out of control as Doug takes a leave of absence from his despised PR job and copes with the claustrophobia of an unsatisfactory marriage, familial demands, and the tenacious power of love. 18,500 first printing.

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 à 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