A day of disappointing reading

Just a depressing day of reading yesterday; maybe it's me, or maybe not. But went with high hopes to current New Yorker story, Garbor, by Gareth Greenwell, an author being heavily promoted now for his forthcoming novel from FSG, still probably the top major-market literary press, and the story starts well, writing strong a captivatingly conversational, but after all the story is about an American writer at a writer's conference in Bulgaria and his interactions over the course of a night of heavy drinking with a small cadre of writers - and really what's a more tired, navel-gazing topic than the travails of a young writer among other writers abroad? But perhaps GG can lift this story above expectations, and at times he does so - I did follow the narrative to the end - but what's the payoff? We shift focus a few times to narrator's lamenting the breakup w/ his boyfriend, but this sorrow is not developed into much of anything (perhaps GG makes much more of this broken relationship in the forthcoming novel, from which this seems to be an excerpt); there's a moment when one of the Bulgarian writers expounds that writing a story is like making love to a woman, to which the narrator adds, Why not to a man?, thereby confounding the Bulgarian - and, yes, part of the point is that there are multiple perspectives on love and sex (of the narrator's longing for his ex-boyfriend we could say: why not a girlfriend), but this is hardly a groundbreaking insight at this point. At the end, one of the Bulgarians, a priest, swims naked in the harbor; expected more to come of this, but story or excerpt just ends with the priest swimming against the tide - not much or a resolution, nor of an insight. Will still look to his novel for more when it's published. Speaking of which, tried to read further in Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery and finally, completely lost in the arcana of who's supporting whom and why in the battles for an Italian nation under Garibald, I just have throw up my hands in exasperation and say: Who reads this, other than reviewers paid to do so? This novel is so demanding and so nearly incomprehensible that it does nothing for me other than to prove that Eco was really intelligent and learned. Fine. Got the point. Not reading any further in Eco. Or maybe it's just me.