Texas by David Gates, 2018
The magic trick:
Showing the protagonist in different (some imagined) roles as a father
I read this story once and couldn’t figure out why I liked it. The man at the center of the story is so completely unlikable.
So I read it again and still couldn’t crack the code.
Maybe it’s fun to spend time with someone who is so completely self-involved and lazy? If so, I’m not sure what that means about me.
There is something very satisfying, though, about the story – aside from the anti-hero protagonist. It fits together very well as a structure. We spend most of the story in upstate New York at Garver’s old farmhouse. We learn that his own wife and children used to live her with them. We get to see what he might be like as a mentor or father figure when a young couple and their 5-year-old rent rooms in his home. Then near the end of the story when the scene shifts to Texas and he visits his daughter, we see how he might be as an actual father.
So it’s a neat structure as a portrait of him failing when asked to give to others – what he used to be like as a father, what he’s like as a surrogate, and finally what he is as a father.
None of it is pretty.
And that’s quite a trick on Gates’s part.
The selection:
A young couple answered his ad in The New York Review of Books, and when they got out of their rental car, on the Saturday afternoon before the Fourth of July—him in jeans and black T-shirt, with shaved head; her in yellow sundress, dark bangs, those retro cat’s-eye glasses—he thought, You’ll do. She released their little girl from her car seat and lifted her out. The girl’s pudgy legs dangled, then kicked.
As always, join the conversation in the comments section below, on SSMT Facebook or on Twitter @ShortStoryMT.
Subscribe to the Short Story Magic Tricks Monthly Newsletter to get the latest short story news, contests and fun.
Short Story Magic Tricks 