On queening out and trading in
a review of Jordy Rosenberg's ravishing new novel, "Night Night Fawn" (spoilers)
We’ve all known someone like Barbara Rosenberg. The star of Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn, Barbara is the kind of homophobe with an aptitude for queenery so advanced that only she could be mystified when her own child comes out queer as a three-dollar bill. From Night’s first pages, she makes no bones about the hatred she cherishes for her trans son, whom she refers to, alternately, as my daughter and the bird (because, to her Oxy-addled brain, her son sometimes appears to her as a literal bird, with a beak and everything, his squawks and feathers evoking morbid ravens and parliamentary hooters). To add insult to injury, he’s the only person who’s stuck around to witness the widow’s slow decline from cancer, not that Barbara’s grateful. “Isn’t it enough that I should die with only you as my caretaker?” she bitterly wonders.
But our star, who curses her memories of the bird’s baby butch days back in the ‘80s—his first crush on a men’s corduroy blazer, his untoward passion for the shiksas of Flashdance (1983)—has no one to blame but herself. A failed actress turned receptionist, an aesthetic martinet cum lover of deals, a class-conscious cinephile too ambitious for the man’s world that left her behind, Barbara is, despite her overall meanness, an inveterate hag of undeniable charms.
This is her tragedy. If you didn’t want to raise a “lesbian,” Barbara, you shouldn’t have been so fun!
I’m only teasing. Barbara is no more responsible for her son’s transness than genetics, or fluoride in the water, or sexy movies about girls who finance their dancing dreams with night shifts at the local gentleman’s club. Though she spends years policing her son’s clothing and behavior, bemoaning this “golem of upside-down gender,” even she must admit that it’s hopeless. After all, she observes, “the Jewish god doesn’t do miracles.”
But Barbara just can’t help herself, any more than she can help hoarding Thierry Mugler mini perfume spritzers for a daughter that will never exist. She’s stuck with the injustices of her own gender, class, and ethnicity—what, is her son too good to share the the fate to which she has (ostensibly) resigned herself?
This is what ratchets this miserable woman’s cruelty to another level of sadism: she recognizes the bird’s desire for actualization because she shares it. When she tries to prevent her tween from acquiring his coveted corduroy blazer (his lust for this item of clothing even stronger than his pubescent interest in seal-slick Jennifer Beals), she does so with total self-awareness. “And about this blazer,” she fumes, “I shared the universal parental woe of witnessing your child wrestling with the existential void and coming up as empty-handed as you are, or worse. A combination of despair at being unable to make it better and outright inflamed disbelief that no matter what you had done to stave it off, your child was going to tangle themself in their own lifelong knot anyway.”
Barbara’s nascent transphobia undergirds her son’s entire life, but it’s merely an extension of an older reactionary tendency. Rosenberg (the author) draws an unmistakable line between Barbara’s gender bigotry and Zionism, a political movement toward which she’s more or less neutral until she and her soon-to-be-husband, Stephen, get into some heavy petting at a screening of Exodus (1960), Otto Preminger’s historical drama about Israel’s founding starring “blondie boy” Paul Newman as Haganah rebel Ari Ben Canaan. In Night, the scene shifts between the back row at King’s Theater in Flatbush and Barbara’s unspooling present in contemporary Manhattan. In the former, “Ari’s hair goldened against the night sky of Palestine—now Israel!—and I put my arm around Stephen’s torso and hugged him.” In the latter, the following chapter begins with her outing her son to the nurses tending to her by shouting, “This is Jordana, she’s a Marxist!”
Genocide on one page, misgendering on the next. This is not a conflation of scale, but rather a very effective demonstration of how the logics of one violence inform the other. As a self-proclaimed yenta failed by her identity, Barbara trades it in for the death cultist’s access to self-importance and belonging; for something that is, for once, as she puts it, “entirely about me.” Her son’s identity, which includes a fierce rejection of Zionism and everything it represents, is an insufferable rebuttal. “An Ordinary Fascist,” as Barbara herself puts it, can find no kinship with the son that she calls an “ugly freak” while he drives her helpless carcass home from the doctor.
Rather than seeking out the “reason” for her son’s transness—a common trope in cis art, culture, and propaganda—Rosenberg (again, the author) flips the convention, finding for us instead the kernel of hatred that blooms before burning out, leaving a larval fascist in its smoking crater. Only rarely does this mechanism falter, as when Barbara invokes Dog Day Afternoon (1975) a little too familiarly for a cisgender woman of her age. But any missteps to be found in Night, and there aren’t many, are the result of Rosenberg’s admirable penchant for swinging for the fences. Look no further than his formidable prose:
Consciousness—Dr. Freud said (or so my daughter once lectured, her nose poking over a book)—begins at the point of our forgetting. At excitation occurs, an insupportable one, and consciousness is the print it leaves. A jewel-roofed city in a cloud of smoke.
In Night’s acknowledgments, Rosenberg calls his second novel a satire, which wasn’t how I would have described it while devouring it. But while many of his readers will be trans, I doubt we are the majority of his audience. The story of Barbara and her son go up against one of liberal art’s most deeply ingrained fantasies: that an unlikeable character can be redeemed through empathy; that by coming to understand why they are the way they are, the reader initiates the transformation that reunites them with the people they’ve alienated with their selfishness, venality, and cowardice. No doubt some will be all too happy to excuse Barbara’s sins, even if the book around her hasn’t a shred of forgiveness for her. Nor should it, I think, as someone with a Barbara of my own.
In the final pages of Night, we learn that Barbara’s son has been dead for many years, since a motorcycle accident at the tender age of 18. My daughter and the bird are ghost and reaper, respectively, projection’s afterimages animated by the guilty conscience of a mother about whom, despite her proclivities, no gay could ever say, “That’s Mother!”
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