Town & Country by Jess Walter Review

A middle-aged gay man decides to put his 75 year old increasingly senile father into care but he can’t find the right place for the unrelentingly hard-drinking/smoking/randy old salty sonuvabitch - until he comes across the unique location of Town & Country…

Jess Walter is finally back this year with a new novel, The Cold Millions, and a new short story, Town & Country, and it’s been too long - Walter needs to publish more often! If you’re unfamiliar with this guy and want to know where to start, We Live in Water was an excellent short story collection and I also highly recommend his novels Citizen Vince and The Financial Lives of the Poets. That said, Town & Country isn’t amazing but it’s a decent story.

It’s well-written, like all Walter’s work, and it feels like a convincing portrayal of what it must be like to come out to your parents and figuring out your sexuality in small town America. Jay, our narrator, has to keep reminding his senile dad that he’s gay and that’s why he doesn’t have a wife/girlfriend, and the scene where he yells in a bar to his drunk dad that he’s gay for the umpteenth time was funny.

The story’s never boring but it’s lacking a certain level of invention to make it memorable. What Town & Country turned out to be was a kinda neat idea for a care home but once the story’s over I had that “that’s it?” feeling - it’s a bit underwhelming, all in all.

Maybe it was the older gay narrator and the humorous nonsense his senile dad came out with but the story put in mind of David Sedaris’ brilliant essays, so I think if you’re a fan of Sedaris then you’ll probably enjoy this one. His dad was an amusing wag of a character, awkwardly incorporating modern phrases into his speech (“I feel like she’s slut-shaming me”) and proudly announcing throughout that, re: his infidelities, he’s quite the “cocksman”!

Town & Country is a fine short story of contemporary fiction but nothing that special. Still, it’ll help hold over fans of Jess Walter until later this year when The Cold Millions is released.