Let Down by Understatement

Scott Broker’s debut novel is like ‘Scenes from a (Gay) Marriage’ with undertones of Stephen King.

By Gideon LeekMarch 3, 2026

• Fiction

“WHAT’S OUR FAIRY TALE?” Jack, our narrator, asks. “The Dream and the Disappointment?” In this scenario, Jack is the titular disappointment, while his husband Randy, a renowned photographer, is the dream—although lately, it’s been more like a nightmare.

Randy’s mother has died and his sanity has been shaken by grief: “Randy nods sadly, just as he walks, talks, eats, and breathes sadly. Sometimes I imagine him as a humidifier of sadness, forever expelling fumes.” He no longer leaves the house alone; when he is forced to go, he insists on taking a ziplocked portion of her ashes (“More mother,” he begs as they pour from the urn). Jack has problems too. He’s recently conceded absolute artistic defeat, killing off his own career as a playwright, and is a walking wound of embarrassment and guilt—irritated constantly by reminders of his husband’s success. Even his loss is squarely in second place: after all, as Jack admits, “a grievance is nothing in the face of actual grief.”

Together, they’ve ventured off into a strange small town for rest and reconciliation. But the semi-gothic locale not only fails the couple; it also disappoints the reader. The trip and town don’t just take a back seat—they get thrown out on the road, driven over, and crushed by the main plot. Jack and Randy’s problems—which are genuinely interesting—play out much like they might have in Hawaii, or Paris, or even back home in Brooklyn.

Scott Broker’s debut novel is about many things: the pain of grief, the meagerness of adventure, the challenge of professionally competitive relationships, and the risk that comes with being close to anyone. It is at times very funny and at others very perceptive; it is also sly, withholding, and a bit disjunctive. Jack, who narrates the book, is self-serving and dishonest but also quick and intelligent. Randy, supposedly the more talented of the pair, is irrational and impetuous; his behavior often verges on stupidity. His photography, which includes such wizard ideas as sticking a baby in a dryer (titled—what else?—Somnolence: Sleeper #44), comes across as tacky and juvenile—one imagines his photo books for sale at Urban Outfitters. (Jack seems to share this suspicion, in a catty moment recalling Randy trudging through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 book Phenomenology of Perception as though he’d confused it for a high-level photography guide.)

Jack describes his current career moment as “exile, where plays are not written and joy is not reaped.” He has transitioned from an early career artist—“Like Artaud in a gay bar,” according to The New York Times—to a mid-career dropout, one of those former writers who becomes your dentist or therapist. Meanwhile, Randy is a sensation. People approach him on the street. Critics laud him. Jack describes him as a strong candidate “for most beloved photographer.” Even at his lowest, he reeks of fame and success. At one point, a stranger congratulates Randy on his performance in the 2014 film Ex Machina. “You’re thinking of Oscar Isaac,” says Jack. “He’s in that movie. Randy is not.” No one thinks anything of Jack.

This makes for an uneven, unsustainable relationship. They are no longer starving artists in the city, wrapped up in the dream of each other and each other’s greatness. That was ages ago. They’ve become older and wealthier, joining the sanitized, post-Obergefell same-sex elite. At no point do they worry about discrimination or money, and they are repeatedly praised for their gayness. Their sexual relationship remains adventurous and explicit, but they are not edgy or outcast in the way they might have been a generation ago. They are, as one local in the town remarks, “suburban.” Jack and Randy are both unhappy with these results. Jack is jealous that Randy is the successful one. And Randy is, as we progressively learn, genuinely disappointed in Jack—not for giving up playwriting but for his failure as a husband.

Florence, Oregon, the setting of The Disappointment, is stock, artificial, and wrong: “[S]ix blocks of waterfront shops […] with flower baskets hanging from every light pole, seagulls decorating the sky, and businesses with names like Traveler’s Cove and Beachcomber Pub.” It’s like a set of Provincetown that’s been constructed in Ottawa for tax reasons. “Wake up, Randy,” says Jack as they arrive. “We’re in Disneyland.” They might as well be. There is a Life Is Good shop, with repulsive bumper stickers for sale: “My Other Car Is a Motorboat. Honk If You Love Big Tuna. Buy Me A Drink If You’re Gonna Ride My Tail.” But like any good amusement park, the town has a darker side: the hall of mirrors, the old mill ride, the staff bathroom where Mickey Mouse takes off his head.

With his depiction of Florence and the Florentines, Broker, who has taught courses on literary horror, flirts with the genre. The reader is constantly reminded of the resting evil that lurks in small towns. During their stay, Jack and Randy are subjected to secret tunnels and séances. They talk to kids who speak in riddles. At one point, a man casually informs them of a pending local proposition to institute canings as an alternative to jail time. Throughout, Florence retains an air of “purgatorial entrapment” that hints constantly at an impending turn into nightmare.

But most of this backdrop barely registers. Jack and Randy are too busy debating their comparative misery to appreciate their moody surroundings. They are never swept up into investigating Florence’s various mysteries. It takes Jack 116 pages to even bother learning the meaning of the town’s menacing slogan, “Florence, Where People Fly and Dogs Die.” (He’s right not to care: it’s ultimately banal.)

There is something interesting, I think, about Florence as a place of compromise. As Jack puts his mentality at one point, “if suffering inside, go out.” And Florence is out—it’s not their apartment. But it’s also, for Randy, a way of not really having to return to the world. He has already been there—the house belongs to generous admirers of his—and has strong positive associations from his last trip. Plus, there simply isn’t anyone “real” out there. He won’t have to face peers or friends, just Twin Peaks central casting. Which is to say that the trip was a great compromise and a bad idea. If this is all they can agree on, then are they really still compatible?

Over the course of the book, as Broker parcels out the history of their relationship, it gradually becomes clear that this isn’t just temporary craziness, or a process of outgrowing each other, but a fundamental incompatibility. “I’m appalled by his grief, the depravity of it,” Jack complains, but what he is truly appalled by is the open expression of strong feelings—something he denies himself, seeing it as indulgent, unnecessary, and distasteful. At the start of the novel, he describes a scene from Parthenon, the final play he wrote:

The protagonist, Rex, stands where I stand, staring at his own grieving husband and finding himself unable to cross the threshold. For two full minutes he totters, alternating his focus between a loose splinter in the doorframe and the crying body on the bed. It is meant to be agonizing. It is meant to be morally opaque. Art, I believed then, and still do, no matter if I’ve stopped making it, works best at the nexus of contradiction. When Rex eventually leaves, choosing to offer nothing in the way of comfort, the audience should feel equal shares of contempt and relief.

Art, to Jack, does not explore the nexus of contradiction or offer moral opacity—it explains. “Emotions were inarticulable to our family,” he recalls. “From afar we could see them, then they would enter our house and transform from solid to gas.” And as an adult, he’s not able to display his emotions, so to reach Randy, to reach anyone, he has to make them feel his feelings for him. This form of communication doesn’t work. He describes his current relationship with his parents as “benign estrangement.” Audiences didn’t get his plays either.

Randy, conversely, lives under the black cloud of his bleak childhood. For years, he has stewed with rage at his father—“ruiner of childhoods, of marriages, of family vacations to the Florida Keys”—and has allowed himself a too-close relationship with his mother into adulthood. He has gone through years of therapy, working hard to overcome the rage he blames on his father—carefully repressing what Jack calls a “second self” with a “terrifying fire” of jealousy, a Randy with “black pupils and wet palms,” piling up accusations “which he threw like rocks.” Jack blames Randy’s jealousy on his mother, recalling how, on a visit to see her in Ohio, she “tried to prevent us from going out to eat the state’s famous Skyline chili by insisting she could make it herself.”

But as anyone who experiences extreme romantic jealousy will tell you, admiring homebodies aren’t especially sexy. (Not to mention, if you’re going to be jealous anyway, it’s a sanity saver to stick with someone who will justify those concerns.) And Jack is not exactly the golden retriever type. He flirts. He fools around. And he lies about all of it. In his narration, he stresses that he has never cheated on Randy specifically but does reveal that he is an active user of the gay sex app Scruff (where he sexts and shares nudes), that he has cheated frequently in the past, and that he recently had an extended nonphysical intimacy with a woman, the star of his fourth play. That last liaison, which had involved a failed threesome with Randy, was a point of contention in the period before his mother’s death—she had, Jack believes, encouraged Randy to leave him.

Jack is prodigious in his denial of wrongdoing: “Cheating is slipping on your husband’s used condom on the kitchen floor. Cheating is a scratched-up back, a sweat-moistened car. Cheating is not a phone call. Cheating is not a hundred phone calls.” But even as he proclaims his innocence, he is still clearly baiting Randy—both because he finds his husband’s jealousy “perversely thrilling” and as a way of holding power in the relationship. “Sometimes I miss it,” says Jack, of the jealous rages. The problem, then, isn’t that Randy is acting crazy, as Jack initially suggests, but that he isn’t crazy about him anymore.

Broker’s book suggests one thing and does another. It is not the sexy, somewhat menacing vacation novel it promises to be. But the deception and distraction form part of Jack’s character and make sense for him as a narrator. He can’t bring himself to just write Scenes from a (Gay) Marriage, but he still must tease his way to the truth. He can’t just take a photo. He can’t just scream or cry. He can’t even bring himself to actually cheat or start a real fight. And that’s why he’s gone off with his husband to fantasyland, why he’s trying so desperately to sell the dream of a future together instead of the disappointment that they’re done. It’s why he’s unhappy and why, as long as they’re still together, Randy will be too.

It’s also why, frankly, The Disappointment left me, as a reader, hoping for a little more—I was expecting the mysterious small town to help put their problems in perspective, to unite them in common cause, but instead they chewed up the scenery. Early in the novel, Randy learns that an old lost piece of baggage is being held for him at the airport in Portland. Throughout the book, there is the looming question of what awaits him in that long-forgotten bag. But it’s just an empty camera. “No severed head,” says Randy. “I wanted more.” Is this a sly subversion of our genre expectations? Yes. Is it a bit of an ironic understatement? Surely. It is also, ultimately, disappointing.