Character Studies Drive Drue Heinz Winner

There’s a delicious sense of duality that runs through the lead characters in Bill Gaythwaite’s debut story collection, A Place in the World, winner of the 2025 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. It’s a trait wielded prominently by Katie, the protagonist of short story “Off the Grid,” who recalls her former bouncer boyfriend Nick returning a cash-filled wallet to a man who dropped it on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue one late night. It’s an act that leads Nick to have a moment of loving honesty, in which he proclaims Katie is “making me a better man.” That Katie remembers the scene later with an air of disgust, practically spitting, “This guy doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me at all,” could act as the book’s running refrain. It’s also a hallmark of these 11 stories, each building with superb tension, buoyed by vividly rendered characters tending to share important inner truths through dramatic irony.

It’s there in “The Lost Object Exercise,” when middle-aged Nate arrives with his husband to a Fire Island vacation weekend, finding among the invited houseguests “a freelance food stylist … a masseur with a celebrity clientele. The third man was named Martin MacDuff, and I had hustled and robbed him thirty-four years earlier, when I was twenty-two years old.” It’s a clever technique Gaythwaite employs as it invites his characters to reminisce, using flashbacks to explore inciting incidents. In this case, Nate is newly homeless and steps into the “famous bookstore in the village … only to get out of the cold.” Martin, the bookstore’s manager, finds him attractive, one of several Gaythwaite’s leads who maintain “a glossy, attention-pulling youth,” in stark contrast to other characters’ relative wealth and maturity. For all of their outward attractiveness, there’s also a rich inner life churning within these main characters, as well as a sense of survival. Many arrive in the Big Apple after fleeing poor homes and small towns, unwilling or incapable of sharing their circumstances and often falling back on fictional versions of their lives to their significant others.

In the title story, Vincent meets Fisher “in the middle of Central Park, on that big green lawn called the Sheep Meadow. It was a warm afternoon, and the sky had the pale blue look of faded denim.” And like the references to Edith Wharton, Gaythwaite likes to balance innocence against experience in ways that often use rebellion as an unconscious motivating factor. Gaythwaite’s characterization foreshadows in a way that signals things won’t turn out well, such as when Vincent describes Fisher as having “the round, plain face of a middle-aged infant and a look of wary politeness. All told, he was quite ordinary, like an extra in a crowd scene.” It’s a moment of honesty and diminishment that sets up what follows

Gaythwaite wields his young leads as more antagonist than villain, with readers getting the inside dope on their motivations and shortcomings that make the stories boil. Sometimes, it’s through omission, as Vincent seeks to use the good-hearted Fisher as “the potential antidote to my snakebit existence. I figured if I could create a sweet, winning image for myself, it would be better for everybody. From the beginning, Fisher wanted to see only the best in me, anyway, like some indulgent grandmother in a storybook about naughty children. … I became something to Fisher that I had never been with anyone else before: irresistible.”

That might be the best way to describe A Place in the World, where each story, as one character tries to explain, “seems like an illustration of ‘the butterfly effect’… the idea that a small change in one area can result in large changes in another. … You see, I wanted you to like me. So I just listened and never said a word.”