I didn't understand why the story opened with a focus on the narrator's mother. Then I realized that the story was going to have this mother in the foreground. It's 'A Private View' by Douglas Stuart, published in The New Yorker on April 12, 2026. The author drew on many of his life's experiences to write this story.
We're in New York City. The narrator, Jack, is Scottish; he's a writer and grew up in Glasgow with his sister Louise in an impoverished single-parent family. Then he moved to New York. His husband David is American, from a wealthy Texas family, and is currently a member on the museum's curatorial team. The two men are on different ends of the social spectrum.
We see Jack's mother Jean. It's said she's a raving alcoholic with questionable fashion sense and no sense of responsibilities. After one botched Christmas gathering that Jean pleaded for and forgot about, her daughter Louise has cut her out of her life. That was years ago. Jack is the go-between who keeps both women updated about each other, although they would never meet again.
We're at the advance showing of an exhibition by a mid-career Italian sculptor at a museum in New York, and we see snippets of the interactions between Jack and his mother, and with David who remains largely in the background. David apparently didn't treat Jack too well when it comes to their opinions about class differences. David seems really mean, almost cruel.
He often treated me like a yokel, like a cousin from the Old Country who didn’t understand the workings of a nation as great as America. His family wore bluejeans and sun-beaten hats, and when they were among their laborers they almost seemed of the people. But I could feel the way they maintained a subtle distance, a faint superiority as defined as any English lord’s. They were Scottish Presbyterians from generations back and so they overlooked it when I used phrases like “council house” and “school dinners,” because although I had been poor, at least I was Scottish, pale and pure from the source.
David’s favorite insult was to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. He did it so often that I once made a list of all the things that he granted me expertise over. Those were rain, housecleaning, and alcoholism.
“I’m tired of you looking at my family like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like they’re villains.”
“Yeah,” I said snidely, “I apologize. I do. I was wrong. I see that now. How dare I think badly of a family that stole everything from Mexicans.”
He pulled the car over and told me to get out.
When I refused, he lifted his boot and kicked me out.
He left me there, sitting on an embankment, shivering in the darkness, for an hour or more. There was no phone signal, no passing cars, no house lights for at least thirty miles.
Eventually, guilt or shame got the better of him and he came back to collect me.
“You can’t look down on another person’s family,” he said.
“I know that,” I said.
I had been humbled by the cold. More afraid of the dark plains than I would admit.
“No, I mean you, you specifically. How dare you look down on someone else’s family?”
We don't know what David thinks of Jack's work as a writer, or as a screenwriter. Aside from class differences that David likes to harp on, he seems to belittle the latter's creativity streak and talent.
The shocker of the story comes as we realized that Jack is talking to his mother Jean, who doesn't exist in real life, especially not at this exhibition. She died in 2014. She is now a figment of imagination in Jack's head. My jaw dropped. As embarrassing and irresponsible as Jack made out Jean to be, she seems to still be a central figure in his life, and in his mind.
David had been watching my muttering for some months before he asked what I was doing. Later, the fact that he had waited those months would be used as evidence in one of our fights to show how painfully self-absorbed he was. When he first asked who I was talking to, I had lied and said I was working on a screenplay and obsessing over dialogue.
He was American, so he liked that.
The next time he caught me was in public. We were heading in different directions on the 6 train when he spied me across the tracks. I had been unaware that he was watching as I talked to my mother. I was laughing out loud, pulling faces in response to some funny little thing she’d said. He rushed up the stairs and along the platform toward me.
People were staring. I thought I should be honest. I told him what I was doing. I told him that I was talking to her. I told him that it comforted me sometimes.
He looked at me like I was mad.
I felt a sadness. I was homesick. But I was not out of my mind. I didn’t feel unwell. I knew what was real and what was not.
If I felt anything then it was a shameful guilt that my own life should be so good when my mother’s had been so tough.
I tried to explain all this to David but I could see he didn’t understand. How could he understand when his own mother was still alive?
For someone in the art industry, David doesn't seem to understand, or even try to empathise with Jack's grief or feelings about his childhood and the past. David gives me the feeling that he found Jack embarrassing. He is short-tempered with him. If this is a marriage, then this husband isn't being very supportive.
I feel for Jack. He is trapped in this marriage by his own feelings and commitment to it. David, as a human, doesn't seem to love Jack very much. Is it for companionship that Jack is staying on in this relationship? We hope Jack knows his worth and comes to embrace it, rather than suffering emotional turmoil at David's words.
I helped her into her coat. “Listen, Mum. I can’t see you for a while.”
“I know,” she turned and put her arm into the sleeve. Her hand was so small. “Och, you go on now. Sure, I’ll be all right.”
“I always wanted to see you in a museum.”
She looked up at me a long moment. Then she placed her hand on my cheek. I could almost feel it.
She didn’t dissolve or blow away in a gust of rose petals. There was never any cinematic ending. I simply turned away. I stopped thinking of her and she was gone.
I zipped up my jacket and headed up the stairs with the last of the patrons. Out on the street, the snow had turned to slush again. I took out my phone and texted David that I was sorry, that I would try harder. This time he didn’t bother to open the text and I knew that he was punishing me with silence.
When I was suitably composed about the role Jean plays in the story, I went to look up what the author intended by placing her in the foreground as a main, albeit a 'fictional' character in the story. Apparently childhood trauma doesn't exist for Jack, and it's only for Jean. Jack would want his mother to have a better life, and he's filled with guilt that he couldn't do more for his mother.
In an interview with the same journal, the author explained why he chose to focus on Jack and his mother Jean.
Yes. I wanted to write about the push and pull of an old life versus a new one, or about the different worlds a person straddles when they belong to one social class but are asked to fit into another. There’s a strange pain there, a tension that is worth exploring, and I think many of us who migrate to the big city often wonder, would my family fit in with this new life I’m building?
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