New Yorker Fiction Review #181: "Underground" by David Gilbert

Review of a short story from the Feb. 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

A couple posts ago I wrote about what I called "metro" stories -- those concerning middle-class, urban white people with problems that aren't really problems -- and David Gilbert's effort here, "Underground," almost qualifies except that the main character is really rich, and gay, so it's a bit more intriguing than your average ho-hum metro story.

If you're looking for a way to kill 45 minutes before you drift off to sleep (as I was last night) then sure, you can allow yourself to be pulled into the world of a 47 year old gay man in Manhattan, from a wealthy family that owns original Marc Chagall paintings and thinks that $70,000 is "cheap" for a piece of art; a man who came out of the closet only two years before and is feeling all the ups and downs of his new life, the freedom, the restrictions, the new dating possibilities, the effect it's had on him as a father, etc. All of which is, I suppose, interesting enough. It is not every day, after all, that a 47 year old father of two comes out of the closet.

But...I have to say I did not find much of anything remarkable in this story, not enough to make any mental notes, anyway. The story starts out interestingly enough, as we really get to see the main character processing his new life, spending time with a new boyfriend who is much younger than himself. But it then takes a turn for the mundane as the character goes to have lunch with his own mother and brother, a lunch that takes far too long IMHO.

I think what David Gilbert is going for here is a sort of John Cheever effect, and he kind of gets there. Added to that, I did appreciate the sort of "shock" ending a la Flannery O'Connor, to at least give the story some kind of payoff.

Stories hit you in different ways at different times. I feel as though I might not have been in the right frame of mind to give this story a completely fair shake. But then again, I'm not sure whether a piece of short fiction deserves that kind of leeway.