Going Dutch: A Novel - Softcover

Gregor, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982103205 ISBN 13: 9781982103200

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

ONE OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S 10 BEST DEBUT NOVELS OF THE YEAR

“A charming, well-observed debut,” (NPR) featuring a gay male graduate student who falls for his brilliant female classmate, “you’ll tear through this tale of a thoroughly modern love triangle” (Entertainment Weekly).

Exhausted by dead-end forays in the gay dating scene, surrounded constantly by friends but deeply lonely in New York City, and drifting into academic abyss, twenty-something graduate student Richard has plenty of sources of anxiety. But at the forefront is his crippling writer’s block, which threatens daily to derail his graduate funding and leave Richard poor, directionless, and desperately single.

Enter Anne: his brilliant classmate who offers to “help” Richard write his papers in exchange for his company, despite Richard’s fairly obvious sexual orientation. Still, he needs her help, and it doesn’t hurt that Anne has folded Richard into her abundant lifestyle. What begins as an initially transactional relationship blooms gradually into something more complex.

But then a one-swipe-stand with an attractive, successful lawyer named Blake becomes serious, and Richard suddenly finds himself unable to detach from Anne, entangled in her web of privilege, brilliance, and, oddly, her unabashed acceptance of Richard’s flaws. As the two relationships reach points of serious commitment, Richard soon finds himself on a romantic and existential collision course—one that brings about surprising revelations.

“Intelligent, entertaining and elegantly written” (Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) Going Dutch is an incisive portrait of relationships in an age of digital romantic abundance, but it’s also a heartfelt and humorous exploration of love and sexuality, and a poignant meditation on the things emotionally ravenous people seek from and do to each other. “This marvelously witty take on dating in New York City and the blurry nature of desire announces Gregor as a fresh, electric new voice” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Gregor holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia. He has been a writer in residence at the Villa Lena Foundation in Tuscany and a bookseller at Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. James was born and grew up in Canada. Going Dutch is his first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Going Dutch ONE
Richard looked out the window. April, and he was sure he could identify in the faces of the passing students a certain late undergraduate mood: the weather having turned sweet, exams just finished, and you’re preparing for whatever plans you’ve made. A summer internship or humanitarian junket. But in the meantime you feel accomplished and blamelessly lavish your days on nothing: afternoon drinking and smoking pot, watching shirtless guys play Frisbee, walking amid the blooming magnolias.

“Why have you not submitted anything?”

The intrusion of Antonella’s sympathetic but firm question made Richard feel like a child poised for a lecture.

“I’m blocked,” he said, nodding morosely. “I just go in circles.”

“There are tricks I can suggest.”

Across her forehead a glossy fringe of brown hair was cleaved asymmetrically, and she wore a gray cashmere turtleneck tucked into Adidas track pants. On the desk there was a plastic container full of untouched salad, one black splash of balsamic dressing down the side. Its sweet smell was filling the office.

“What do you have in mind?” Richard asked.

“Acupuncture, therapies, mind games maybe,” Antonella said. “Have you ever tried standing on your head?”

“That could work.” For a moment he looked thoughtful. He clasped his hands together in his lap. “On the other hand, it all might get better tomorrow.”

A doctoral student in medieval Italian literature—ostensibly—Richard Turner had done little in the past months to deserve the title. It was a significant change. Not too many years ago—he was twenty-nine now—he’d been a cultivated, slightly pedantic undergraduate, someone for whom a high GPA, prizes, bursaries, and glowing reference letters came easily. But lately he’d found himself blocked and unable to write, and in the face of this mystifying impotence, whose source he could not identify, all his efforts at maintaining a long-cultivated identity of academic competence and dependable accomplishment had taken on an air of pointlessness. Yet his solvency depended on remaining a student, and so he continued to show up faithfully at the library and to meet Antonella, his supervisor, in that cluttered office where they were now sitting.

He felt like an impostor, an actor playing a previous self. Still, he decided, given that so few students continued to bother, had ever bothered, to study what she taught, Antonella would be invested in retaining as many of them as she could.

But her face stiffened.

“I will have to write the letter soon, Richard. I cannot in good faith write it without seeing any work.”

“I understand,” he murmured.

His tuition and living expenses were covered by a fellowship from a family of degenerate industrialists with a deep presence in his hometown—the MacLellans or the MacLennans, he always mixed up the name. The long-dead patriarch had wistfully forgone a career as a professor of literature in order to accrue vast wealth, and had set aside a portion for the advancement of humanity, in the manner of Alfred Nobel.

For the money to flow, the foundation required written updates from an academic supervisor every six months. Richard pictured the reader of these letters, no one he’d ever met: some loafing male heir, one of a group of scattered dilettantish progeny who dressed in Balenciaga and ran flailing subsidiaries, scrolling absentmindedly through his phone at a Michelin-starred restaurant as he scooped pâté onto a fussy square of toast. Richard had always felt a condescending superiority to this handsome specter, the same sort of condescension, mixed with envy, that most of his academic colleagues felt toward alarmingly rich people.

“There are others who could use the money,” Antonella said, her crossed arms indicating a disinterested concern for the student body at large, the numberless deserving beneficiaries, while the vaulted eyebrows over her dark, clear, slightly amphibian eyes made her affection for Richard plain.

He should have been much further along. Most of his immediate colleagues had graduated or moved into postdocs, a mellow encampment he’d also once considered his rightful destination. Instead, he was still auditing the occasional seminar, purporting to move forward with a thesis, but he hadn’t written anything in months, the end was nowhere in sight.

“Will they continue to pay?” Antonella asked, her apprehensive voice becoming jarringly conspicuous in the quiet room.

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I was going to ask you that.”

“I’ll delay as long as I can.”

“And I’ll get something to you as soon as I can.”

For the rest of the meeting, in a welcome but abrupt change of subject, they discussed their summer plans. Antonella would be returning to Italy for a wedding, an event she was not exactly looking forward to. Richard imagined he’d probably end up at some beer gardens. Otherwise, the summer was vague. He hoped to get a lot of work done. If he could manage to interest himself in any of the material he was supposed to be interested in, that is. None of it compelled him the way it used to, for whatever murky, idling reason.

“I’m rooting for you,” Antonella said, smiling again. “You’ll come out in the end.”

For a moment he imagined that she would reach out and embrace him, but she didn’t move.

“Thank you,” he said, standing up.

“See you soon, Richard.”

He went outside and paused in the sun, waited as the students, changing class, whirled around him in energetic streams.

AS HE TOOK THE train back downtown in a fresh white shirt under a pilling blue sweater, and wearing the tennis shoes he had cleaned using Windex, Richard wondered if the guy he was going to meet would resemble his OkCupid profile pictures. People so often didn’t. The challenge of presenting oneself on-screen, widely considered a prerequisite for a full life in the early twenty-first century, flustered many, including Richard. There was either too much self-promotion of a flavorless, unoriginal kind—the guy in front of the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower—or a depressing lack of artifice: “obligatory body shot” in the speckled bathroom mirror; the guy smiling beside a buffet, wearing a shapeless suit, his arm around a woman who looked like his wife. One of Richard’s fantasies was telling the love of his life that he’d signed on to the website on a whim, after yet another disheartening date, and there you were. But like all fantasies, it derived its power from its robustly chimerical nature, its palpable utopianism and unreality.

The train swayed.

Did Richard resemble his pictures? He was good-looking enough, he supposed, just shy of six feet, wavy-at-a-stretch black hair, peaches-and-cream complexion, lips he would have preferred substantially fuller. Physically on the broad but skinny side, he wore eyeglasses that were a cross between aviators and Gustav von Aschenbach. His youthful face and at times stuffy sense of dress were two characteristics that pushed his likely age in opposing directions.

“You’re, like, simultaneously twelve and forty,” an old boyfriend had once told him.

Richard looked up and scanned the jammed subway car as a woman pushed past in search of a seat. A few feet away, there was a harassingly good-looking Latino guy dressed in smooth black athletic clothing, wearing earphones, staring at the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982103205
• ISBN 13: 9781982103200
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande