Book Description
"Lordy, what a wickedly wise writer T. M. McNally is.
The Gateway is a terrific book, impatient and wrought up, a book that goes a long way toward answering this age-old question: Why do fools fall in love? Here are seven answers, each beguiling and break-neck and bedeviling."--Lee K. Abbott
"McNally writes from the inside out. These dramatic contemplations on the radical ways we connect in families show his remarkable vision. In prose at once fierce and elegiac, these powerful stories compose a careful and rueful celebration of our times."--Ron Carlson
"Uncommonly dense, complex, and well-made, these stories are vaultingly ambitious, featuring a wide range of character and milieu. McNally's recurring interests are tricky relationships with fathers, with God; infidelity (on many levels); an obsession with history (especially World War II); generational legacy/burden/shadow. Eliot said, `But there's no vocabulary/For the love within a family./This love is silent.' The Gateway, in what seems to me a minor miracle, finds the words."--David Shields
"McNally is a contemporary American writer in that he is completely unsentimental and accustomed to irony; but he is a rare writer for our times in that his work contains a genuine wistfulness for gentler times, gentler connections between husbands, wives, and children. It is the wistfulness of diminished expectations without a loss of hope."--Tracy Daugherty
McNally's subject in the seven stories in this, his third story collection, is love, always love. For him, these are religious stories for skeptics who are spiritually inclined.
