THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART, hypercapitalist hellscape meets trans Terminator

THESE FRAGILE GRACES, THIS FUGITIVE HEART
IZZY WASSERSTEIN
Tachyon Publications
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a queer, noir technothriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue, a trans woman faces her fear of losing her community as her past chases after her. This bold, thought-provoking debut science-fiction novella from a Lambda Award finalist is an exciting and unpredictable look at the fluid nature of our former and present selves.

In mid-21st-century Kansas City, Dora hasn’t been back to her old commune in years. But when Dora’s ex-girlfriend Kay is killed, and everyone at the commune is a potential suspect, Dora knows she’s the only person who can solve the murder.

As Dora is dragged back into her old community and begins her investigations, she discovers that Kay’s death is only one of several terrible incidents. A strange new drug is circulating. People are disappearing. And Dora is being attacked by assailants from her pre-transition past.

Meanwhile, it seems like a war between two nefarious corporations is looming, and Dora’s old neighborhood is their battleground. Now she must uncover a twisted conspiracy, all while navigating a deeply meaningful new relationship.

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

My Review: There are some tropes in the noir genre I love more than others. One is the private dick with a complicated love history. Rick and Elsa in Casablanca. Marlowe and Ruth in The Maltese Falcon. Jake and Evelyn (and her daddy) in Chinatown. Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.Not one tiny shred of honest, forthright communication and commitment to any relationship's future in the lot. This being my deeply cynical belief about the reality of all marriages' basis and fates, I thought I'd got a solid bead on the way the genre will work on this topic.

Laddies and gentlewomen, Izzy Wasserstein blew the (closet) doors off this one.

Dora, our protagonist, lives in a deeply dysfunctional dystopian near-future (a couple decades) post-apocalyptic USA. We don't explore the apocalypse much, just live day-to-day with Dora...Theodora, né Theodore...as she tries to survive in the wreckage of hypercapitalism. She (chosen pronoun) spent years in a hardscrabble anarchist commune with her pretransition Theodore-self's lover and commune co-founder, Kay. The pair split up, and Dora left the commune, over Kay and the others' rejection of her desire to tighten the commune's security about new members and the commune's handling of data. The others felt it was not in the spirit of the effort to be so closed and paranoid; she did. So she closed the door behind her on the way out. Maybe slammed is fairer; maybe slammed the damn door so hard it splintered, even.

And now Dora has to return to the commune, using all her skills acquired while she was Theodore, to solve the murder of Kay. Why was Kay murdered? What did Dora tell the communards about security? Is this thing on? So begins a fast-lane tour of the hellscape that is Kansas City in this deeply divided world, as Dora ferrets out facts and confronts Big Bads. Naturally, there are ties in the story Dora unfolds to the Theodore past...and, not coincidentally, Dora is confronted with the cruelest, most cinema-friendly enemies imaginable: clones of Theodore.

This, then, is the heart of the story. The world, and the world-building, are not deep because you're not here for the wrapping paper but for the gift. Dora has to battle Theodore-faced enemies bound and determined to kill her! Can there be anything more visually appealing than that?! Can the cruelty of deadnaming be more bluntly portrayed?

I really doubt it can. The setup, the story, the world...all part of the point of the read: Identity, its power, its costs, and the sheer nightmarish house of mirrors the trans person must live with, and through, simply to claim what cisgender people walk around blissfully unaware that they possess.

Themselves. Their unquestioned selfhood, unimpacted by the feelings, opinions, judgments of others, unquestioned by the self-appointed guardians of...you know, I just don't know what they are guarding. No one's attacking my maleness by being transmasc or transfem. What needs guarding about that? Anyway, I exist in a bubble of privileges of many sorts, and reading books like this that take me into the unprivileged side of my life do me a gigantic service. Perspective is something I treasure, even when I don't unreservedly enjoy getting it.

I did not read the book with unalloyed pleasure. There'd be a fifth star on my rating had that been the case. I enjoyed the pace; the author starts fast and doesn't slow down. I enjoyed the message; see above. I was squirmy about the echoes of The Man Who Folded Himself. That wasn't unnecessary; but I had to read the author's Afterword to get why it was not gratuitous. I was a bit unconvinced by the Big Bad's motivation. Not eyerollingly so, but in that niggly little itch that says, "really? all this because of that?"

I default back to, readers aren't here for just one experience, just one focus, a single reward for their time spent in Dora's world. It's just a thing I felt vaguely unsatisfied by, and should try to explain to others in advance of their reads.

I think Author Izzy deserves your afternoon and evening to get this involving story into you. I'm glad it's in me now.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: one of the most poignant novella titles I've ever read

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WILLIAM MAXWELL
Vintage International
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

My Review: What a beautiful but sad book.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.

As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?

What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return.

VOLT: Stories...as jolting as the name implies

VOLT: Stories
Alan Heathcock
Graywolf Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude. 

Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

My Review: When reviewing collections, it's hard to know what to say about them whole and entire unless they're linked stories. With a group of stories like this book is, it's easiest and, IMO, best to adopt what I've called “The Bryce Method” in honor of an online friend who introduced me to the technique: A summary opinion, plus a short line or a quote from each story, together with a rating for the story. So as my summary opinion, I offer this: Bleak is not always to be avoided. Sometimes art needs shadows to prove there's light. These stories aren't feel-gooders, and shouldn't be attempted by those in need of uplift. There is none here, but not one of these tough, scrappy folks is gonna lie down and die any time soon. They're too scared of the God they're sure they'll meet on the Other Side.

The stories in book order, faithful as always to the Bryce Method:

The Staying Freight gives new and chilling meaning to “Took a walk, Be back soon.” Why? Coming back is going backwards. Winslow Nettles needs, and needs badly, to go forwards. 3.5 stars

Smoke is a horrible moment in a no-better-than-you man's life, one that changes him forever and not for better. How can one human bear a burden of sin alone? Better, when you're afraid of the god that you've invented, to load some onto an innocent other. Horrifying, and just beautiful. 4.5 stars

Peacekeeper brings justice to a world where there isn't any, courtesy of the local grocery-store manager turned Sheriff. Is lying always wrong? After reading this, you won't think so. A beautiful and thought-provoking modern morality tale, complete with purifying flood. 4 stars

Furlough couldn't be more horrible: A man, not a dumb kid, leads a young woman to the kind of rough justice that makes a civilized person's stomach churn. That he hates it, that it is vile and cruel in his eyes, is probably worse than the resulting nightmare. Spare, elegant, and horrifying. 4 stars

Fort Apache sets the purposeless present and the vacant future against the void inside adolescent souls and the results explode into fire, chaos, and that angst of inchoate longing that humans will do anything to escape. 4.5 stars

The Daughter sets a mother lost to random accident, a daughter whose grief severs her ties to reality wile making the whole world painfully abrasive, and a mother-of-all-storms loose in a cornfield maze. Returning to life, such as it is, is always painful, but it takes the pain of a neighbor's child to turn the daughter's rage outward again. 4 stars

Lazarus is the least successful story, to my mind anyway, but it's still head and shoulders above most anything else I've read this century. When a man is wreathed in the smoke of sacrifices to his vicious god, how can he offer moral guidance? By remaining empty. Then what's needed most, right then and there, can fill you up and come out for who needs it. “It's your song, son...It's not for me to name.” 3 stars

Volt sets the Sheriff, sworn officer of the court, against everything her hometown's about, and against her own ideas of justice instead of the law, as she cooperates with the city cops in bringing a convicted felon/Iraq war veteran in for a court date. 5 stars

...”One world was like it was back home, where folks ate cheeseburgers and kids had sleepovers and ball games and people went to work and got angry over stupid shit that didn't matter. Like their TV ain't no good, or they ain't got the right sneakers. Some shit like that.… But then there's another world, where folks ain't got a goddamn thing, and these motherfuckers'll try any damn thing to blow your ass to dust. Sarge says it was up to us to keep them worlds apart, and if we thought that shit that happened over there wouldn't make it back to some little girl's sleepover then we had our heads full-way up our asses. ...Supposed to rally us, I guess. ...But then I had to go back out that next day and the next and all I come to think on was how I ain't never had no sleepovers or ball games or none of that shit, and didn't none of it make a damn lick of sense.”

Well. There it is. The people who fight for the rights of us all don't have the privileges of us few. And we wonder how come there are so many walking wounded out there screaming their pain with their guns and dancing to the tune of radio mullahs whose hate and bile spewing nonsense feels just like their listeners do inside.

These are beautiful and brave and sad and wrenching demands for anyone with fifteen dollars to spend on a frippery like a book, or with enough luck to live where there's a library, to pay attention.

Ours is not the only world. No oceans separate us from the enemies we've made within.