Spoilers ahead. Preorder your copy of Darryl here.
There is, as we trans people often lament, a Trans Narrative. You know the one. And that’s fine, we insist, perhaps a little uneasily. Some people’s stories are like that. But not everyone’s is! Mine wasn’t! (I’m different!) Couldn’t we have more of that? More difference—like me? I came to Jackie Ess’s debut novel expecting to see this metanarrative explored in the story of Darryl Cook, an Oregonian cuck whose life is unraveling. Area Man begins to wonder if maybe he wouldn’t like to be Area Woman, but with a twist.
As our hero’s egg tendencies revealed themselves, I was even more on my guard, reading with my hand at my hip, so to speak. At first, Darryl’s transing is as classic as they come, consisting of most of the stages of grief plus bonus extras like dissociation and, briefly, institutionalization. “I wonder what happens to guys like me,” Darryl writes as he muses on what separates the alphas who fuck his wife from the soyboys like him. “We’re all kind of hiding in plain sight. Everything kills us, it’s all too much.” Darryl’s is something akin to the hero’s journey, or Pilgrim’s Progress, as Torrey’s endorsement offers, populated by the lies one tells and the lies one believes; the self-brutalization; the small, shocking moments of courage, all recombining into a gender crisis that haunts Darryl like a pendant of saliva suspended over an unwilling face.
I read Darryl’s first half as an egg cracking in real time, watching the pressures of Darryl’s marriage, finances, mental health, burgeoning queerness, friendship with a trans woman, etc., accumulate, bearing down across the weakest points of his shell. I wondered, not without a little superiority, how well most cis people would be able to track the cracking. At what point would your garden variety cis realize what was going on with dear Darryl? Would Ess’s inevitable twist, I wondered, be the adoption of a Trans Narrative that was so inside-baseball that cis people would, paradoxically, be unable to see it? That would be pretty cool.
But that wasn’t it. I was wrong about Darryl. What I had thought would be the anatomy of an egg, albeit twisted, was suddenly something else, which I realized around the time that Darryl merges universes with Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle, when Darryl learns that Clive, his therapist as well as one of the men who fucks his wife, Mindy, was once known as Brian, the guy responsible for snuffing the young and corrupted gay escort, Brad, of Cooper’s The Sluts (2004). Darryl’s trajectory to transness is disrupted, the hero’s journey supplanted by a quest of another kind as his desire for a new woman, as well as for Bill, one of the bulls who emasculate him with Mindy, is further complicated by his dwindling bank account and his proximity to the Hannibalesque Clive.
Darryl ends with Darryl and Bill riding off into the sunset together, the former only just escaping slaughter. The sweet and sturdy Bill has accepted his gayness for Darryl, whose trans escalations have petered off into moody demurral. Though there are aspects to his genderqueerness he’ll continue to claim, he does not want to join the “frankly miserable” world of his friend, Oothoon, and her impoverished transness. Ess leaves us no reason to think that a Beryl exists on the other side of the last page. Darryl remains, the egg intact.
So here’s my lesson: In trying to slot Darryl into a trans narrative, if not the Trans Narrative, I neglected to consider the possibility that it wasn’t trans at all, or at least, not simply trans. Though many discourses of contemporary trans writing—from the chaser/trans binary (what came first, chicken or egg?), to the coercive pedestalization of trans women and femmes, to our demands for a linear and moral trans journey, to the problematics of microidentity, pathologized and otherwise—initially suggest themselves, Darryl is something else altogether. For me personally, the efforts to determine whether and in what way a text will be reactionary and/or in conversation with the texts around are already so overwhelming, so distracting; perhaps the greatest casualty of this is Darryl’s linguistic beauty and comedic genius, occasionally so subtle as to almost slip through your fingers. “Sometimes I feel like my heart is a long hallway with every door locked,” writes Darryl. It’s good to be twisted, but I still have egg on my face.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.
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