Along with writer Richard Ford, David Gates has become one of the premier chroniclers of an increasingly prominent condition: suburban malaise. 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. Gates is almost cynically focused on disastrous relationships: Divorce, separations, and not-quite-distanced break-ups are the norm in Gates' excellent short-story collection The Wonders Of The Invisible World. The neurosis of each character Gates creates is a mix of the modern and the mundane: A young gay man left in charge of his rehabbing sister's son worries that the kid might discover his hidden copy of a magazine called Fuckbuddies as much as he worries what will happen to his nephew when his sister returns. 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. One remarkable facet of Gates' talents is his habit of leaving the storylines hanging: Just as his characters often speak and think in fragments, so do his portraits often end at crucial junctures, thus thwarting any chance at closure. Wounds heal but scars remain, like ellipses passively continuing a story that can only end in death.