a book
Preston Falls
David Gates · 1999 · 337 pages
The answer to Doug Willis¿ mid-life crisis is a sabbatical at his rural retreat in Preston Falls, two months spent restoring the faded splendour of the farmhouse, reading Dickens in the evening and watching summer gently fade to autumn. But following a marathon whiskey drinking session, a disastrous attempt to tear out the living room ceiling and an incident with a sheriff at a local campsite, Willis ends his first weekend away in jail, and it¿s clear the wired, burned-out New York copy-writer within is still very much to the fore.
And while Willis¿ wife Jean struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, sceptical kids, Willis¿ ¿break¿ crumbles into Dewars- and Cocaine-fuelled disarray, and he embarks on another kind of journey altogether.
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sourced from public statements
Colin Firth
“Doug Willis is a man who’s holed up in his country place after his wife and kids go back to town. His marriage is in a bad state, and he’s obviously in some kind of midlife crisis. I’m so intrigued by how Gates describes the fantasy world of men, and how many of them want to be the kind of guy who can talk about engines, who knows Keith Richards guitar chords—as if that’s going to matter in your 40s. I can see why women might only be able to read this as a science experiment, a sort of ‘Look what happens to men when you pull their wings off!’ But there’s a very tender note struck in the last scene. The couple has decided to split up, and Willis walks out late at night. Gates has taken you to a point where you think their relationship is irredeemable, but he shows there’s that thing you can’t put in the equation. The wife still goes after him. I found that quite moving—that in the end love feels like that, like familiarity.”↗