The Wonders of the Invisible World

The Wonders of the Invisible World is a short story collection by author David Gates published in 1999. The ten stories share themes and character types with Gates’s longer works, including his Pulitzer-finalist novel Jernigan.

“The Bad Thing” is the first story in the book. A couple moves to the country so the husband can work on the children’s book he’s been commissioned to illustrate. They complained about the city, but now they complain about the country, and both behave poorly. The husband smokes even though he promised he would quit, and the wife drinks despite being pregnant.

In “Star Baby,” a gay man named Billy agrees to care for his young nephew while his sister goes through drug rehab. Billy is worried that he will be perceived as a child molester because of his sexual orientation and the boy’s age. Initially, Billy is determined to continue his liberated lifestyle, but he slowly gives up the singles scene to concentrate on caring for his nephew.



In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” an unnamed man deals with a possibly pregnant girlfriend and his lost clarinet, a valuable instrument. As he narrates his attempts to locate the clarinet and navigate his feelings for his girlfriend and their potential baby, he deconstructs his own prose and thoughts, offering savage and brutal critiques of his literary delusions and use of symbolism. When his girlfriend mentions the seventeenth-century book that gives the story its title, however, he does not see the parallels between a book concerned with demons and unseen monsters and his own struggles with his subconscious. In the end, he chooses to value the clarinet more than his own child.

In “Vigil,” a man sits by his daughter’s bedside after a car accident leaves her in a coma. He contemplates how the family, long divided after his wife’s adulterous affair and their subsequent divorce, slowly comes back together in the wake of this emergency. As family moves in and out of the room, the father learns more about his daughter, things he did not know. He slowly realizes that she was also having an affair, and was returning from a tryst in a motel room when she was hit. As the daughter awakens from her coma, her father wonders at the parallel nature of her and her mother’s behavior.

In “Beating,” a woman meets her husband, Tobias, at a bar after work and listens as he obsesses over the Rodney King beating. She struggles with the realization that Tobias, once reliably liberal like her, has soured into a more conservative person she does not recognize.



“The Intruder” is told by Finn, a university professor who is working on a documentary about gay pornography. Finn is worried that his younger lover James is growing tired of him and looking elsewhere for affection. One evening while viewing porn ostensibly for his work, Finn sees James in a scene and realizes he is not as worldly as he assumed.

In “The Crazy Thought,”Faye and her husband move from their erudite, urban life in New York City to a country home. As her husband takes on more and more of the trappings of what Faye considers a redneck lifestyle—a truck, a shotgun, and a rural accent—she becomes increasingly miserable and unmoored from reality, longing for a return to her old life and the man her husband once was. She begins to think she has supernatural powers and might be able to cast a spell to return her life to normalcy. Her sister and brother-in-law visit, but Faye is unrelentingly negative, and they leave. Faye is finally alone in the house, isolated and contemplating suicide using her husband’s shotgun.

“A Wronged Husband”tells the story of Rick and Cindy, two miserably married people. Rick opens the story by skipping out on work and drinking, emerging later to find his car has been impounded by the city. At home, he confesses to Cindy that he has had an affair. Cindy lies to him, saying her sister has died and she will be away for the weekend, when she is actually spending the weekend with another man. Cindy has no regret or guilt. When she returns and Rick learns that she lied, she laughs and taunts him, telling him that she has had many affairs, often with his friends and coworkers. Then she slaps him and tells him that she is leaving, and that this is what he wanted all along.



In “Saturn,” an elderly man named Van tends to his wheelchair-bound wife until she dies. He visits Holly, who narrates the story, and her husband Seth. Holly is having an affair, and Seth constantly smokes marijuana in rebellion against the suburban middle-class life he has settled into. Van refuses to act his age. He openly lusts after Holly, then steals her car and goes to a bar, gets drunk, and drives home while intoxicated. His refusal to accept the limitations of his circumstances inspires Holly to escape her stultifying life. After getting high, she takes the car to go see her lover, but loses control and crashes.

The final story in the collection, “The Mail Lady,” is narrated by Lew. Lew has suffered a stroke, and while his interior monologue is clear, sharp, and bitter, his verbal speech is a jumble of slurs and incorrect vocabulary. His wife Alice attempts to understand him and care for him, but often fails. Lew’s spiritual epiphany and conversion to Christianity had caused some distance between them. Lew is somewhat obsessed with their mail lady, a strong, vibrant woman who can physically do everything Lew cannot. She is also a lesbian, which Lew disapproves of. When Alice gets their car stuck in the mud while attempting to get Lew out of the house, the mail lady must rescue them, to Lew’s consternation.