SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel, trans awakening story

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN: A Novel
GRIFFIN HANSBURY
W. W. Norton & Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.

Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is always a class divide in capitalist societies. There are reinforced, heteronormative binaries; there are intense pressures to conform. In 1984, these things were unquestioned, and enforced by laws prohibiting "crossdressing" and enabling parents to abuse and harm their children physically and psychically to "straighten them out."

There was a lot more, but that's plenty for now, if you weren't there you should be glad you missed the AIDS deaths, the hoo-rah for Reagan shit, the pillaging of Social Security...oh dear, starting to sound familiar? Oh, I forgot: the war on workers, the plant closures, the pension-fund thefts....

None of that shit is foregrounded but it very much makes the attitude (transfem) Sylvia carries, downright truculent, make more sense than it already does. Melanie...Mel...is attracted to Sylvia for her serious edge, her survivor's black humor, her wealth of knowledge Mel wants and needs. Mel wants to become Max. Mel has no way to verbalize that, has no framework to put a new mind into, is reeling from the very existence of someone...someone she knows...holding a slightly skewed mirror to her thus showing that she is real, there are others.

Of course, capitalist patriarchy is not about to let Mel go.

I'm queer but not trans; I've known it since 1966 without knowing what it was or meant, just that it was me. As a male, my path was hugely easier than Mel's or even Sylvia's. I got threatened and bullied in school. No one ever followed through because I'm also large and tall. It was entirely bad enough; these characters would've given anything to be in my so-easy place. I hurt for them now, in this miraculously better world we've wrestled into being that can never be left to just run the right way because "They"...the god squad, the macho pindicks, the scumbag transphobes...will not allow it. Our lives, our happiness, our progress, all threaten "Them" in some inexplicable way.

I still don't get that. I have the one "christian" sister who said to my face (okay, my ear, it was by phone) that gay marriage threatened her church because "what if "They" make us perform a wedding?! It will diminish my marriage!"

I was more patient then and did not simply hang up and never speak to her again. We had a discussion, but I was so sick with rage that I remember little of it except telling her that if someone sued their church to force them to marry a couple queers I'd contribute heavily to their legal defense fund.

Again, this is mild compared to what the characters face in this story.

It's never been easy to be Other. It leads to the emotional and physical violence of being Othered. As the story moves from 1984 to 2019, I felt a lot of the emotional rawness, the highs and the lows, leaching out; the author wanted, like me, to make some points, and in the context of a novel that drains dramatic tension below optimal levels. It doesn't ever recover, though. We get a satisfactory ending where from the jump I was primed by the intensity of the story for a satisfying one. It's not bad, it's not poorly thought out; it just didn't go to the next level. Things like Mel becoming Max don't resonate like the woofers at a concert because we never delve, or even dabble, in the dysphoria inherent in transness pre-transition; we don't get, let's say, the bathroom-usage nightmares that make the pervasiveness of transphobia and its implicit capacity for potential lethality immediate.

So I land on four stars and strongly recommend you give this (after some probing questions, though) to someone trans you know and love. I think they'll really mean the thank you they offer.

THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, a truly excellent book about conformity's immense costs

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
Sloan Wilson
Da Capo Press
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Universally acclaimed when first published in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit captured the mood of a generation. Its title—like Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451—has become a part of America's cultural vocabulary. Tom Rath doesn't want anything extraordinary out of life: just a decent home, enough money to support his family, and a career that won't crush his spirit. After returning from World War II, he takes a PR job at a television network. It is inane, dehumanizing work. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities—and take responsibility for his past—he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself.

This is Sloan Wilson's searing indictment of a society that had just begun to lose touch with its citizens. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a classic of American literature and the basis of the award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

My Review: 1955. That is, if you're math-challenged, 65 years ago, and the year that Simon & Schuster published this book. So Wilson was writing it in, it's safe to say, 1953 (67 years ago). And this is what Sloan Wilson said:

Money, I need money, {Tom} thought. If they don't build a new public school, I should be able to afford a private school. I should get everything but money out of my head and really do a job for Hopkins. I ought to be at work now....
Money, Tom thought. The housing project could make money, but it depends on re-zoning, and Bernstein says we shouldn't ask for that until they vote on a new school.
A new school, he thought—so much depends on that! ... I should work for a new school, and I should work harder for Hopkins, and I should be making plans for our housing project. Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work? A man's work should be his pleasure—I shouldn't expect anything more.

Tom Rath has just been to see the overcrowded public school his daughters have to attend because, unlike his own father, he can't afford to put them in a private school. He muses on these thoughts while waiting for a late commuter train into the city, where he will take on a lowly personal assistant's position and, in the process, displace a number of female employees from their physical space.

Sixty-seven years...eleven legitimate Presidencies...since Author Wilson was penning these words, and not that much has changed. Now, of course, it could easily be a mom having these platform reveries, because we've been sold the bill of goods that nannies and au pairs are plenty good enough to raise the kids we've had but don't feel like raising even if it means NOT having a home theater, six DVR-equipped TVs, and each kid with an unshared Xbox. If mom's better at business, dad, YOU stay home and raise those people you engendered. Read to them, make them a snack after carpool, help with their homework. Hiring out parenthood sorta makes it pointless, doesn't it?

Ahem.

Me and my rants.

Author Wilson's book analyzes the sources of Tom's inner discontent as disconnection and materialism. I agree. The alarm bell sounded by this, and by the 1956 movie, went unheeded despite the fact that both were hugely popular and successful in their own spheres. (The movie was popularly supposed to be as good as the book, for once.)

At every turn, MONEY the getting and spending of, obsesses and defines Tom. His wealthy grandmother is being cared for by a greedy granny-nanny, and the hijinks appertaining thereto are most instructive for today's audience. Tom's boss, the venal and piggish Hopkins, plays out before Tom's increasingly revolted gaze his own probable future of alienated kid (extra probable because his three are TV obsessed brats), estranged wife, and grasping mistress(es). Then things get complicated when a wartime indiscretion with an Italian lass provides a surprise to Tom's unsuspecting wife.

Sloan Wilson wrote of his own time. Change the props, update the clothes, and make it about Betsy the wife, and nothing much has changed.

I'm sad about that. So much needless hurt caused in this world from sheer, wasteful greed for MORE when there's more than enough right in front of these hungry-souled people.

About the 1956 film, well...I can only offer as my not-inexperienced opinion that it was turgid, slow-moving, and in the end not up to the bar set by the novel. Gregory Peck was damned good and dull as Tom; Jennifer Jones was much better as Betsy. And can you *even* with the way this went through the studio system! A bit less than a year between publishing on 18 July 1955 to Nunnally Johnson's writer/director's chair for release 12 April 1956! I really want to know the story behind that one.