In this debut romantic comedy, a gay male graduate student named Richard manages to strike up a relationship with a brilliant female classmate, only to fall soon thereafter for someone else: an attractive, successful man named Blake, with whom Richard enters a confusing love triangle.
...[a] glorious debut novel...a smart and sometimes sardonic tale of queer couplings in the era of Grindr, obnoxious foodie culture, and millennial boredom ... Going Dutch is a feast for the senses. I found myself totally enthralled by its rich language and whip-smart observations. But the characters sparking off of one another—that is what kept me furiously turning the pages, hungry for more.
Going Dutch casts a scintillating eye on the queer urban millennial male ... James Gregor’s debut novel swerves with a queasily, intimately familiar form of discomfort: the yearning of a generation faced with grim job prospects, heightened virtual connectivity, the seemingly endless and lonely and unbridgeable space between the excitement of singledom and the comfort of monogamy. It’s a book of deceptive ambitions, a breezy page-turner that, every few pages, slides in an observation that inspires some combination of laughter, mortification, and admiration ...
Gregor’s feel for the character’s manipulations is slick, if a little severe. The read on Richard, smart as it is, feels more sociological than empathetic. And Anne, in all her harrumphing moodiness, delights on the surface, but she gets the short end of the Gay Best Friend stick; her demanding nature verges on mean-spirited caricature. Indeed, Gregor oscillates between the kind and vicious versions of this story. He’s more comfortable within the latter but fights to edge the former to victory.
...Gregor’s debut novel is a carefully observed story about desire, love, and dependence ... Readers will be swept up in Richard’s life and love triangle, even as they wonder if he has any idea what he wants.
