THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL: A Novel
by Ben Grossberg
University of Nebraska Press, 244 pages, $21.95
THE SPRING before Obergefell, poet Ben Grossberg’s debut novel, takes place in the months before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage. This 2015 ruling will have a special resonance for the novel’s protagonist, Mike Breck, a lonely, middle-aged gay man living in small-town America.
Mike, who’s pushing fifty, scrapes together a modest living through part-time work at Lowe’s, adjunct teaching at a community college (housed in a former mall), and handyman jobs. He shares his fixer-upper home near Columbus, Ohio, with his widowed father, an eighty-year-old “NRA Republican” still mourning his late wife, who died a few years earlier. To avoid arguing, father and son retreat to their respective rooms and devices—his father blaring Fox News, Mike scrolling the gay dating app Scruff.
