Going Dutch
CBC Books | | Posted: June 8, 2020 8:54 PM | Last Updated: June 8, 2020
James Gregor
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.
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. James Gregor announces himself with levity, and a fresh, exciting voice in his debut.(From Simon & Schuster)
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.
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. James Gregor announces himself with levity, and a fresh, exciting voice in his debut.(From Simon & Schuster)
James Gregor is a writer based in Halifax. Going Dutch is his first book.
From the book
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.
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.
From Going Dutch by James Gregor ©2019. Published by Simon & Schuster.