Life or Death Crisis not always sudden

A WRITER'S WIT
Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?
​Keith Waterhouse
​Born February 6, 1929

Waterhouse

New Yorker Fiction 2017

Rating the Story
***—Excellent [includes profile]
**   —Above Average [one-sentence description]
*      —Average [one-sentence description]

Floc'h

***​February 6, 2017, David Gilbert, “Underground”: Forty-seven-year-old Michael Salter, divorced father of two daughters, meets his mother and brother at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant for lunch and then is confronted with the imminent threat of his own death. This crisis, however (no spoiler here), is only a metaphor that has unfolded throughout the story: his new ami whom he meets through Grindr, a young man with “tens of thousands of followers” (61), the loss of his father as well as a childhood friend, the fact that as a poster dealer his bank account is shrinking daily, an ex-wife reminding him of the monthly check he owes her. His entire life is a crisis and yet at story’s end, where he has the opportunity, faced with a real life-or-death situation to save someone else, his own crises take on a different patina. 

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“But at least he was doing something, something bigger than himself and full of possible meaning, courageous—right, this was courageous, rather than stupid, a sign that he was special, or, at a minimum, useful” (69).

A very nuanced story in which a gay man happens to be the protagonist instead of the subject of a story. Normalcy may just have arrived at last. Gilbert is the author of the novel & Sons, and his November 12, 2012 story, “Member/Guest,” is one of my all-time favorites of recent New Yorker stories.
Illustration by Floc’h

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017