Thoughts on the novel "Going Dutch": Making money move
Sex, lies, and money. (And Medieval studies.)
TL;DR: GOOD NOVEL!
Others have described James Gregor’s debut novel, Going Dutch, as a millennial twist on a traditional tale. I suppose that the presence of Grindr may make this so, but the most interesting thing about it for me is how classic, or classical, the themes and the even the plot of the book are.
Richard is a PhD student at Columbia University and struggling to maintain his enthusiasm for Medieval Italian literature in a world in which nobody could care less for scholarship, let alone his specialty. Even his funding is based on his supervisor writing letters that attest to his productivity, with little concern for results. (A mode of work hardly limited to academia, but perhaps best exemplified by it.)
His productivity cannot be productive in the capitalist sense. And he is personally challenged at basic life “productivity,” meaning competence, self-sufficiency, and being able “to provide,” which are the qualities he is sure he lacks. He doesn’t cook. He’s bad with money. Maybe in this way he is meant to typify a certain millennial: so empowered by apps and institutions that simply carry a person along, from program to meal to party to program, he’s never needed to learn to feed and manage himself.
Richard might sound like a classic bachelor, helpless until he’s rescued by a woman with Home Ec on her resume, but more often in this book he reminds me of the old-fashioned archetype of the woman who knew that her survival depended on charm and her ability to catch and keep a man who can provide.
That parallel has an interesting shimmer to it, since Richard is a gay man. (Unfortunately, I don’t know much about the literature or cultural history (film?) of gay men (or women for that matter) throwing their lot in with a straight, opposite-sex partner in order to survive.) Gregor’s plot thus tosses out this very mainstream cliche and gives us a story about the alchemy of love and money, without any of the grimy shmutz of old gender roles:
Richard finds two romantic options before him: Anne, a woman who is, in her own ways, as warped as he is, but who is ready to rescue him from his intellectual and financial precarity. But then there is Blake, the man Richard had always dreamed he’d meet, a lawyer who wants to set up a traditional life with Richard. But Blake seems far less generous — or less inclined to use money as his love language — and expects more from Richard than does Anne.
Both Anne and Blake have power over Richard in the form of money, but each wields it differently. Anne uses not only her academic prowess but also daily experiences of luxury—mostly in the form of delish, multi-course meals with wine to boot—to lure Richard into filling the empty spaces in her life. Blake refuses to let it enter the sphere of their relationship at all, insisting mostly on going dutch, though in this way, Richard’s relative lack of money remains very present in Richard’s experience of the relationship.
The book recalled to me the essay collection The Secret Currency of Love, which I read as a recent arrival to New York City. Its essays explored the various ways we can prioritize or ignore the importance of money in our society. To ignore it, of course, does not mean you’re exempt from the laws by which it operates.
As with Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, Gregor’s style is pleasurably classical—long sentences with big words, lots of imagery and interiority, a bare minimum of technological encroachment or txt-spk (though for no reason I can think of, text messages are set in an all-caps font). But there aren’t pages and pages of curtain-descriptions! As the plot thickens, I felt visceral anxiety watching Richard’s life become a slow-motion car crash.
The story moves toward a realistic and interesting conclusion, but let it be known that I would shell out cash for a sequel. Narrated by Anne?