The Guncle

Nine-year-old Maisie is more profoundly affected by Sara’s death than her younger brother, Grant. She doesn’t yet have the emotional tools to process her grief, so she is by turns curious, moody, sad, and angry. While Grant can be placated by ice cream and trips to the dinosaur attraction, Maisie demands Patrick account for the injustices of the world. To Patrick, Maisie is very much like her mother, full of fire and resilience.

Over the course of the summer, the bond between Maisie and her uncle grows deep and emotionally resonant—so much so that she feels safe enough to lash out at him with the full force of her fury at her mother’s death. As she yells, “I hate you” (255), Patrick understands what lies beneath the rage. His empathy, patience, and love draw her back.

Maisie represents the tech-savvy younger generation, downloading apps on Patrick’s phone and posting videos on his YouTube channel. While Patrick initially reacts with disdain, he eventually comes around, embracing Maisie’s knowledge and even posting a few videos himself. Their videos become therapeutic, allowing the kids to express themselves and to watch themselves from the outside as objective arbiters of their own lives.

Six-year-old Grant is a hyperactive, silly counterpart to his more serious sister. While he understands that his mother has died, he is too young to process the finality of it. Life for Grant is a day-to-day adventure. He cannot yet think of the long term and is more interested in immediate gratification: the pool, the dinosaurs, making sure the tooth fairy comes. Grant doesn’t question Patrick’s role as the current authority figure, and his uncle is forever grateful for his silliness. In fact, Patrick’s wish for Grant is that he never loses that unbridled sense of play.

Maisie and Grant’s father, Greg, is the recently widowed brother of the novel’s protagonist, Patrick. Greg’s stint in rehab after Sara’s death sends Maisie and Grant to live with Patrick for the summer. Although at first, this seems like a move of desperation, it turns out that Greg and Sara planned the summer together while Sara was dying. Both are keenly insightful about Patrick’s character: they understood that Maisie and Grant could help Patrick work through his loss just as much as Patrick would help the kids work through theirs. The relationship between Greg and Patrick is strained because of unacknowledged pain: When Greg and Sara got married, Patrick felt abandoned, grieving for the loss of Sara being just his friend. As the summer ends, the brothers finally discuss and make peace with these resentments; what helps is that Greg, unlike their sister, Clara, has no qualms about Patrick’s sexuality—both brothers have lost spouses, and their losses bring them closer together.

Patrick’s older sister, Clara, serves as both conscience and provocateur. While she comes off as too rigid and controlling to give the kids what they need in this moment of tragedy, her insistence on structure is important. However, while Patrick acknowledges Clara’s experience as a parent, she refuses to concede that what that the grieving Maisie and Grant need is not a forced return to normalcy, but the freedom to express themselves as they see fit. Clara’s insistence on taking the kids back to Connecticut after she walks in on Patrick’s late-night party comes at exactly the wrong time: Maisie and Grant have just begun to examine their loss and articulate their feelings.

Clara’s decision to sue Patrick for custody of the kids touches on the novel’s treatment of homophobia. The ostensibly liberal Clara never recognized that Patrick’s relationship with Joe was a marriage in everything but name; her dismissal of his grief is the cause of longstanding bitterness.  However, eventually, Patrick’s machinations force the two siblings into a long overdue heart-to-heart, and Clara finally takes ownership of her role in past and current troubles.

Patrick’s neighbors—John, Eduardo, and Dwayne—are given the simple acronym, JED, as a nod to their unique relationship—three men in a loving, stable, long-term relationship. They are the counterpoint to Patrick’s solitude—an example of an unconventional home that society at large views with suspicion. Unlike Patrick, whose rights to marry and adopt have been legally established, JED would love to have kids, but their throuple status precludes any consideration of adoption—something the novel sees as tremendously unfair. Of the three, John is the most fully fleshed out character, offering sage advice when Patrick needs it. JED gives Patrick a valuable perspective on his own self-absorption: They show Patrick that being a parental figure for Maisie and Grant is something to treasure.

Patrick’s agent’s assistant Cassie shows so much initiative that Patrick hires her as his new agent. Cassie’s enthusiasm pushes Patrick out of retirement, as she goes the extra mile to learn about his theater background, his acting style, and the opportunity to parlay Patrick’s popular YouTube videos in a show that leaves him enough time to do theater.

A handsome young actor who is “actually hotter in person in his thick Tom Ford eyewear and sculpted white tee that gave him a perfect James Dean edge” (136), Emory strikes up a romantic relationship with Patrick. At first, Emory’s intentions are unclear—is he interested in Patrick or simply trying to advance his career? But over time, Emory proves the depths of his feelings by showing that he understands the reasons for Patrick’s seclusion: He reads Patrick through the lens of gay history, arguing that all gay people have a tragedy of some kind in their past, “but most of us, we overcome it” (274). When Emory plays along with Patrick’s slumber party, we see that the young up-and-comer has depth, compassion, and insight—the perfect man to rekindle Patrick’s love life.