Gates, a Newsweek staff writer who splits his time between New York City and the bucolic homesteads in Upstate New York, has a journalist's eye for the minutiae that differentiate one dysfunctional relationship from the next, and a perverse fascination with wrenching tidy, green-lawned lives apart. The Wonders Of The Invisible World . A pregnant wife absentmindedly imbibes most of a bottle of booze, only to have her furtive attempts to replace the lost liquor lead to a potentially insurmountable low point in her marriage. A man waits anxiously for his wife to recover from a car accident, if only to ask her whether she's having an affair. Gates perfectly documents the psychological car wreck of lives moving apart too fast to stop while deftly switching his voice and vantage from housewife to grandfather to gay filmmaker with the skill of a method actor.
Wounds heal but scars remain, like ellipses passively continuing a story that can only end in death.
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