Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
A Place in the World
by Bill Gaythwaite
University of Pittsburgh Press
Oct 2025, $20.00, 216 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8229-4876-6
Casual dishonesty with no motive beyond simple concealment often has a way of blowing up into much larger consequences in the eleven delightfully chaotic stories of misguided romance and friendship that make up Bill Gaythwaite’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize-winning collection, A Place in the World. More often than not, it’s what the characters don’t say that gets them in trouble. As Scott, the narrator of “The Simple Part,” tells it while he and his friend Owen walk down First Avenue in New York after leaving a party: “I knew I should probably be telling him about Ned, as that relationship was already impacting us and he didn’t even know it.” Scott’s lover Ned had been killed in a car crash. It turns out that Ned had been anything but faithful to Scott, which he only finds out about after Ned is gone. “My trust was limping and battered,” he confesses, “In fact, my trust didn’t exist any more. It had slipped right off the endangered species list.” But though Scott realizes that, as they say, “honesty is the best policy,” by story’s end he has not yet fessed up to Owen. “Choosing to be myself had been the simple part,” he says earlier, about how he’d attracted Ned by being a clown rather than pretending to have an interest in political activism. Will Scott opt for the “simple part” now?
In the title story, a young hustler named Vincent Marshall, who has come to New York from rural Pennsylvania, meets Fisher Dunleavy while sunbathing in Central Park. Fisher “had the round, plain face of a middle-aged infant and a look of weary politeness. All told, he was quite ordinary, like an extra in a crowd scene.” Fisher, who teaches literature at City College, is nursing a broken heart because his husband Charles recently passed away. Vincent knows a mark when he sees one, and he fabricates a story of his own background, including a college in Maine. Soon enough he has moved from the cockroach-ridden tenement he shares with two other roommates in Alphabet City into Fisher’s luxurious apartment on Riverside Drive, which has photographs of Charles all over the place. “It’s like the Karen Carpenter of apartments,” Vincent notes with some misgiving, but it’s definitely an improvement.
As their relationship develops, Vincent is constantly afraid that “anything I said would expose me as the twentysomething fraud that I was” to Fisher’s friends. Which is exactly what happens when Fisher and Vincent go on a vacation to Denmark. Brokenhearted and betrayed, Fisher sends Vincent packing. But by the time it all blows up in his face, Vincent has started having feelings for Fisher (“Fisher was the sweetest person I’d ever known”). From the start, Fisher has taken an interest in Vincent’s intellectual growth, even gave him a copy of his own book of essays on literary criticism, A Place in the World. Vincent does occasionally consider coming clean to Fisher, but it’s finally too late to tell Fisher the truth. Years later Vincent reads Fisher’s obituary in the newspaper. He’d eventually remarried, though the loyal Charles is mentioned as his predeceased spouse.
Deception, indeed, is at the heart of these stories. In no fewer than four of them, embezzlement figures into the plot, often blindsiding the protagonist, who is either the son of the embezzler, a victim himself (Kevin in “If You Only Knew”), the nephew of the embezzler (Gavin, in “Unlike Some People,” whose aunt, Chloe, has served a prison sentence for embezzlement), or the wife of the embezzler (Gail, in “Certain Healing Properties”). In “The Joy Factor,” a story about the reconciliation of a brother and sister in a Maine resort town, both are the collateral damage of their father’s embezzlement scandal.
Secret-keepers are riddled throughout. All but three of the stories are told by first-person narrators and contain a strong element of confession. “Certain Healing Properties” even features two first-person narrators, a husband and wife named Jay and Gail, who reveal their sense of guilt and culpability for the mess they find themselves in (Jay’s embezzlement). In the final tale, “The Lost Object Exercise,” Nate, the narrator, is confronted thirty years later with his own larcenous behavior as a gay hustler back in the day when, with his long-time husband Joe, he encounters his victim at a party on Fire Island. Joe knows nothing about the incident, just as Owen knows nothing about Scott’s shady past in “The Simple Part.” In “Unlike Some People,” when the narrator’s boyfriend Ian asks Chloe what Gavin was like growing up, she waits a beat and then, “‘Gavin?’ she laughed. ‘Oh, Gavin had his secrets.’” He still does!
Or take Katie, the narrator of “Off the Grid.” She hasn’t told her husband Sam everything about her history. “I usually offer up just a slightly sanitized version of my past,” she confides. She only tells him the funny bits about when she was an exotic dancer. “And I haven’t told him about the time I was an escort for all of about thirty minutes, because what’s to be gained from that?”
But for all the “bad” people, there are always the “better” people, morally, people who are examples of better behavior to the wayward protagonists. There’s Fisher in “A Place in the World,” showing Vincent how a man of decency and compassion operates, not that Vincent necessarily takes his cue from him. Joe in “The Lost Object Exercise” provides an example to Nate, again, not that Nate necessarily follows the example. Even Chloe, the embezzler ex-con aunt in “Unlike Some People,” spouts Buddhistic aphorisms about compassion now that she’s out of prison. Indeed, when she catches Gavin cheating on Ian in the park bushes with the shallow glamor boy Skyler, she scolds her nephew. “If you want to end your relationship then do it,” she says. “But don’t do it this way. Don’t hurt Ian needlessly. And he will be hurt, Gavin. You’re better than that, unlike some people.”
All of these stories take place in New York or Boston, the characters in their twenties and thirties during the important actions (many are told in retrospect, though the action is related present tense). More than one comes from a bleak background in Pennsyltucky involving violent parents and drunk fathers (Vincent in “A Place in the World,” Katie in “Off the Grid,” Eileen in “The Disaster Book,” Oliver, the narrator of “The World at Large,” Nate in “The Lost Object Exercise”). These characters often find themselves in difficult financial situations that have no easy solutions for their simple survival. New York is a rough town.
Many of the gay characters are either involved in or simply fascinated by theater and movies, and this provides fuel for the plots. “The Lost Object Exercise” is full of theater references, from the name of the person Nate steals $2,000 from thirty years back – Martin Macduff – to the vey title of the story, which alludes to an acting-class training in which would-be actors pretend they’ve misplaced something valuable and then go about trying to convey their emotions without uttering a sound. Nate’s erstwhile roommate, Tess, had been an aspiring actress, and he uses her background to mislead Macduff. Nate also tells Macduff his name is Caleb, after Macduff picks him up at a bookstore in the Village, trying on a new role. “Caleb was a name I always liked, so biblical and forthright. I guess introducing myself like that suggests I already had some strategy for deception.”
Gaythwaite’s sheer wittiness is a delight, even without the gripping moral dilemmas that propel the stories forward and the vivid, often morally questionable but nevertheless endearing characters who bring the plots alive. The reader turns the pages to see how their situations are resolved – or not resolved. When Katie and Sam have dinner with friends at their apartment in Queens, Katie observes: “I so admire Joe and Ivy’s nesty vibe, even if their apartment sometimes resembles the aftermath of a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.”
Or take the beginning of the story, “The World at Large”: “Yes, Janis Joplin survived!” How can you not be snagged by a line like that? But Oliver, the narrator, is talking about the cat he’s taking care of for his actress friend Nina while she is away in Toronto shooting scenes for a movie. It’s a story about fathers and sons, another potent theme of the collection. Oliver, who is telling the tale to his absent friend Nina (by letter? email?) has just run into an elderly man in the mail room, where Oliver is collecting Nina’s mail. The man is wearing a black T-shirt with the words Balls Deep on it. Turns out it’s the name of Milo’s – the man’s son – alternative funk rock cover band. Oliver is gob-smacked by the man’s concern for his son, the joy and relief he exudes for his son’s present circumstances after so much tsuris, and, except for the fact that “I won’t call it an epiphany because I don’t believe in epiphanies within a real-life, human context,” Oliver has an epiphany about love and commitment when the man tells him: “It’s all been worth it, you know,” then continuing in “the style of old-fashioned reassurance”: “Milo, parenthood, everything.”
Somewhere within the deception that marks all these lives is true human feeling, and Bill Gaythwaite mines it admirably with nuance and subtle humor. The prestigious University of Pittsburgh Press’s Drue Heinz Prize recognizes excellence in short fiction. Past winners include Mubanga Kalimamukwent and Kelly Sather. A Place in the World truly deserves the honor. The tales are gripping and though the moral dimension is clear, Gaythwaite does not resolve the stories with neat and simple solutions.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press, See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books, The Trapeze of Your Flesh from Blazevox Books, and most recently, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, published by Kelsay Books.