Going Dutch By James Gregor
Gay & Lesbian Review
August 29, 2019
A CANADIAN TRANSPLANT to Brooklyn, Richard Turner, the protagonist of James Gregor’s comedic and captivating debut novel Going Dutch, is broke, self-absorbed, somewhat befuddled, and highly appealing. Pursuing a doctorate in medieval Italian literature at Columbia, he suffers from writer’s block, and his thesis has stalled. If he doesn’t submit something to his advisor, Antonella, soon, his fellowship funds will dry up.
Never having thought of himself as anything other than gay, Richard becomes enmeshed in a network of relationships that threaten to upend the life he always imagined he would have, thus giving the novel its dramatic tension. Living in typically overpriced Brooklyn, he shares a sun-deprived apartment with a straight roommate he barely knows. His eating habits are by necessity simple—macaroni and cheese, raisin bran, and other staples—his daily indulgence being a cappuccino at Sloppy, the local coffee shop in his increasingly flush neighborhood.
Gregor’s satirizing of Brooklyn’s rapid gentrification is dead-on. Sloppy has a diverse and hipsterish clientele drawn to “the quality and ethics of the coffee,” a place where “low-key celebrities frequently came in and let their adopted children crawl around on the floor,” even though the toilets were often stopped up and one might get a whiff of a dead rodent.
Richard had come to New York largely to be near Patrick, whom he’d met several years earlier in a study-abroad program in Rome. Patrick is the unforgettable “first one,” and his hovering presence is felt throughout the novel. While Richard tends toward self-doubt, Patrick has panache and confidence and is “oppressively happy.”
Unsurprisingly, the dating scene in this distracted urban world of endless possibilities takes place online via websites like OkCupid and Grindr and other social media meat markets of “faces and torsos and crotches.” Away from the virtual vortex, Richard often runs into men he’s encountered online. At the Boiler Room, “he knew that the guy wearing shredded denim shorts was HORNY KEWL AND MELANCHOLY, and his favorite thing was BEIN NAKED WITH PEOPLE I LUV.”
Early in the book, Richard sets out for Café Grumpy to meet Blake. Putting aside his reservations from Blake’s profile—he’s intoxicated with “that avatar of selfishness,” Ayn Rand—Richard is disarmed by “the genuine enthusiasm in Blake’s voice. Was Blake actually looking forward to the date? Most guys in New York were fidgetingly impatient to skip preliminaries, to get wherever they wanted to go, whether it be marriage, sex, or somewhere in between.” Blake is a lawyer who also acts in an amateur Tennessee Williams troupe, and he comes across as a potential “keeper.”
Meanwhile, at a departmental party, Richard chats with Anne, the Italian program’s intellectual standout. Suggesting they collaborate on a paper, Anne, whose family is affluent, begins inviting Richard to pricey lunches at “white-tablecloth restaurants” on the Upper East Side, where he can barely afford a bottle of Perrier. He often avoids her, as when a Grindr opportunity appears just before they’re to meet and he sends her a text saying “A FRIEND IS IN CRISIS.” Anne begins to see that he’s in a rut and offers to help him with his writing (i.e., write for him)—support that Richard sees as a possible lifesaver for his academic career.
Gregor is adept at creating the novel’s strongest element, the gradual, subtle, and credible development of the bond between Anne and Richard. At the same time, he leaves us with some doubt about Richard’s motives. Visiting her classroom, where she teaches undergraduates, Richard is “strangely excited” as Anne, small and a little plump, “is transformed, emitting waves of musky, indeterminately foreign glamour.” Is Richard attracted to Anne, and, if so, what are we to make of it? Gregor offers this: “But then, his heroic dedication to the male body—all his screensavers were Mapplethorpes, for instance—and his rigid indifference to the female body, had begun to seem passé. Once a kind of calling card, the fact that he was attracted to men wasn’t particularly novel anymore. Yet it was men he was attracted to; masc men if he was being honest. ... Still, for reasons unclear to him he’d felt unable to rebuff or even to clarify her overtures.”
The ethically dubious partnership bears fruit. Anne’s work on Dante’s theory about the use of the vernacular now belongs to Richard, and Antonella praises his submission. Richard qualifies to attend a conference in Montreal that Anne will be part of, and they decide to rent a room together. On one of Montreal’s hotter days, between conference sessions, they go for a swim at a public pool. Richard wears a red Speedo that Anne insisted on buying for him. Lying on their towels, applying sunscreen to one another, and taking dips in the water, they share a moment of emotional unity—even while Richard has an eye on the young men wearing swimsuits even skimpier than his.
“What am I doing?” he wonders. People would think they were a couple. (Or, perhaps not, considering his swimsuit!) “He could get a raging sense of claustrophobia when a woman, one of his female friends, was affectionate with him in public.” Misrepresentation, inauthenticity? “They were shutting him off from his potential. But why was it more authentic? Was it more authentic?” When they fall into bed together just before leaving Montreal, their enthusiasm makes up for any lack of skill.
Back in Brooklyn, trying to absorb this new twist in his relationship with Anne, he happens to run into Blake at a bar where he had gone to meet Patrick and friends, and he goes home with him. Their bonds deepening, Richard gives both Blake and Anne “what they gave to him—friendship, romance, sex, or otherwise. No one was left out.” Except neither knows about the other, and Richard doesn’t seem to be considering the potential consequences. His obliviousness can seem cruel, and the reader, intrigued by the nuances and contradictions in his character, may become less sympathetic.
Of course, eventually the three must come face to face. Richard has agreed to move in with Blake. Isn’t this what Richard, as a gay man, has always wanted? The collision occurs when Anne spots them one Saturday morning in SoHo and invites them to join her for lunch at Sant Ambroeus: With dread taking hold, “All Richard wanted was for a knife to come down through the table and cut the room—the world—into two distinct, quarantined halves.”
The book’s plot can seem thin at times, but this is redeemed by the author’s perceptiveness in laying bare the protagonist’s, and our own, motivations: how we are drawn to another person; how, consciously or not—and often for the wrong reasons—we become bound up with that person; and how we sometimes fail to make honest and authentic choices, due to cultural forces or personal baggage. It also raises the question of whether sexual attraction is destiny, and whether emotional intimacy can sustain a relationship. At the novel’s center lies a mystery more complex and elusive than that of desire and identity: What makes two people want to be together?