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cuckoowaspA monstrous, massive, shimmering, hideous spectacle of cynical beauty. Through a hypnotically repetitive structure of sexual encounters, drug use, sadomasochism (in the traditional sense), and nights tricking at the bar, is built the message: love is all that makes life worth living; and yet with love, through love, despite love, you can't escape anything at all, not one thing. In fact, love often makes things worse, or is your whole problem in the first place. But even knowing that changes nothing.
Let's start with style: a strangely timeless magical realism of the gutter, thickly embroidered with allusions to ancient Sumerian and Egyptian religious texts, the early Christian mystics, Colette, homophobic midcentury quack psychiatrists, and the multiferous sufferings of the ever-present Judy Garland and the frequently-present Natalie Wood. Elaborately claused, jewel-like, multi-faceted and multi-pleated sentences that unfold and unfold, splattered with semen, vomit, pussy juice, and bottom-shelf whiskey. Great reams of the best sex writing I've ever read. Beautifully observed dialogue with no quotation marks, in what feels like an in-universe choice by the semi-omniscient narrator who nonetheless makes no claims to journalistic integrity. Jab after jab of painful emotional realities, which get steadily carried away from you by the waves of the prose, until the next one comes. Three examples:
(By the way, the only figures more eager to deadname Judy than her sadistic john are the book's mainstream reviewers: LA Times, NY Times, Alta, Publishers Weekly. Good look, everyone.)
The whole time I was reading, I was arguing with myself about the "true" origin/purpose of this intense transmisogyny. Vollmann has a history of crossdressing and exploring gender fluidity in his work, part of which I think was done purposely to inform his characterization of Judy. Is a crossdressing straight male author "in conversation with" (as they say) transfemininity? It's not really my place to make that kind of call... but, I guess, nor is it my place to let Vollmann off the hook, or "excuse" some of the most appalling instances of what I can't help but feel is garden-variety transmisogyny ("Who can say why this withdrawn, dishonest little boy was not hostile, in which case his lies, then his threats, might have matured into rape and murder? Fortunately for society, he was self-hating like Karen Strand").
Another disturbing factor to grapple with comes at the climax of the book, in which Neva's sexual history of incestuous child abuse reverberates from past to present. I'm still at a loss to understand how the climax fits into the rest of the story, how it fits into Neva's life story, """what it's trying to say""" about CSA and lesbianism, whether it's """trying to say""" anything at all... I was dismayed to see that not a single reviewer of the dozen I read attempted to tackle this, whether mainstream or internet-posted. So, with all the beauties of this book, there are a lot of disturbing uglinesses as well.
However comma. Turning to the afterword and the extensive source notes, I discover that Vollmann has both earnestly anticipated and disarmed a politically correct reader's critique of the ~problematic~ components of his work. He is clearly a sensitive and attentive writer, which already showed in the way he inhabits the inward realities of all his characters, from the strangest to the most abject; but the afterword and notes show that he's also done extensive research to contextualize and ground his characters & their world in real people's lives and politics. Judy's hideous biography is "partially constructed from memoirs in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and partially from interviews, all seasoned with appropriations from Judy Garland's life." Her constant deadnaming is even revealed to have an artistic intent: the historical Judy Garland was born Frances Gumm; her parents wanted a boy, and early in her childhood called her Frank.
The source notes are a luscious feast of all the references, inspirations, epigraphs, and "mutilations" (his word) that stud his work, organized in chapter order so you can easily go diving. Weirdly, the source notes also contain "more book," in the voice of the narrator and revealing additional character bits and information that weren't in the main text; this part was very exciting to me, and I felt that he was doing something new and very interesting.
In the afterword, he makes what I suppose is the work's thesis statement:
Let's start with style: a strangely timeless magical realism of the gutter, thickly embroidered with allusions to ancient Sumerian and Egyptian religious texts, the early Christian mystics, Colette, homophobic midcentury quack psychiatrists, and the multiferous sufferings of the ever-present Judy Garland and the frequently-present Natalie Wood. Elaborately claused, jewel-like, multi-faceted and multi-pleated sentences that unfold and unfold, splattered with semen, vomit, pussy juice, and bottom-shelf whiskey. Great reams of the best sex writing I've ever read. Beautifully observed dialogue with no quotation marks, in what feels like an in-universe choice by the semi-omniscient narrator who nonetheless makes no claims to journalistic integrity. Jab after jab of painful emotional realities, which get steadily carried away from you by the waves of the prose, until the next one comes. Three examples:
She had her way, and very tactfully managed it, as I do declare, of checking the alarm clock, which never went off in my hearing, thank goodness. My well-off friends who can afford to go to therapists (even the transwoman sometimes went to one; I called him the rapist) inform me that in most every session comes the disagreeable moment when, while happily elucidating the most complex, interesting and worthwhile topic on earth, which is to say themselves, they find themselves unaccountably checked, perhaps by a sad smile, or a glance to the side; after which the rapist, who for fifty minutes has listened almost as would a true friend, gently but unashamedly says: We'll have to stop now—reminding my friends that this was never anything more than paid listening over a pre-fixed block of time. In the case of a prostitute the time may well be less inhumanly measured—by the orgasm, for instance (assuming that the client doesn't take too long). A wife offers up more fungible moments: the looked for bedtime intimacy, prospective duration undefined, may unexpectedly be converted into a mortgage conference, a live-streamed movie on Mammazoid, or a quarrel. By contrast, a sweet-eyed snuggly girlfriend gives eternity as long as it lasts; in other words, her sessions terminate not because she is rejecting her lover, but only on account of constraints imposed by this unfeeling world. What does it feel like for a Catholic at confession? Does the priest rush her along, or does she get the pleasure of fully disclosing her every sin? This I canot know. But it does seem that if I went down on my knees, exposing my full vileness to the Goddess, I could go on day and night if that suited me.
In those days most of us sought out love in the most crowded places—because while prowling for gemstones on that same cut in the mountain where rival rockhounds also pry decreases everyone's probability of finding a lovely specimen, love-hunters actually increase each other's likelihood of success. You see, most of us craved the same thing: ourselves, reflected in each other. One would think we could have won the prize by staying home and looking in the mirror—as I myself so often did, switching out the mirror for a rum and sodapop. But loving the lesbian taught me that self-love was too easy. As Judy Garland's mother explained to the world: She's worked hard because she's so interested in getting ahead. Meanwhile the transwoman toiled to look even three percent worth loving; while poor Francine was condemned to balance out the cash register, and every day the stage hands had to paint the Tin Woodman's face with ten dollars' worth of genuine silver. What a world, what a world...!—But what was love, and how could we know it if ever we found it? Some say that fire is neither matter nor energy, but whatever arises between them. That description satisfies me far less than the fantasies I get when altering the colors of the flames by sprinkling in this or that chemical salt...—and to say that love is something which flickers between two people is to describe it only from the outside. If I could only be one of those two...!
And from the final chapter:
I would mislead you if you carried away the impression that she got to be admired by her public one last time, like Judy Garland in that glass-topped white casket. To be sure, it was as if we were all bearing her on our shoulders to the grave, in a file even longer than the mid-morning soup line at Saint Anthony's, but because she had been more than any of us, now she was longer than our multitude, so that her legs and feet continued stiffly far behind (the transwoman longing to be buried alive beside her), and no matter how we struggled to catch it, kiss it and touch it, her head went before us; we were determined to save it from hanging down in the dust; not one strand of her adorable hair would be soiled by dirt, not until the dirt smothered all of her!—but it was safe anyhow, on that long rigid neck. So it seemed; it also seemed as if we were fighting over her beautiful rigid corpse, which we had all exposed, bitten, penetrated, drunk from, slobbered on and used; but of course this parade, like so many of our fantasies, could never even have been organized, much less consummated; the last event for which we had showed up in concert had been Selene's wedding.
Now for the plot & characters: The queer-trans-sex trade underbelly that frequent the bar "are a family" in the true sense of the word—cruel, bullying, transactional, entitled, sexually abusive, often violent, desperately needy for love yet often unable to either give it or really receive it—yet they continue to love you and show up for you as best they can. (Until they don't, because they're on a comedown or in jail or have killed themselves.) Cash serves as a synecdoche for love, friendship, pleasure, access, the energy to live one more day: characters pay three and six and seven dollars for drinks at the bar, scrounge together fifteen and twenty dollars for a pill or two, and strip/lip-sync/turn tricks for enough money to do it all over again; while the magical Neva has a sealskin pouch filled with hundred-dollar bills that never run out, as inexhaustibly rich in cash as she is in love, and as generous with its disbursement. The strange timelessness of the story operates primarily through the vibe of this filthy bar and the lives of its patrons—the book takes place in 2015, we see the Obergefell v. Hodges decision happen on the page along with a constant drumbeat of real hate crimes against lesbians/queer Black women/trans women taken from contemporary headlines, but the gender politics and material state of the city seem to be drawn from 10 or even 20 years earlier. Occasional yuppie influencers and tourists intrude on the bar, taking selfies, yapping about product marketing streamlining, and ignorantly ordering glasses of red wine, but mostly people place phone calls and show up desperately to bang on each other's doors. The primary way characters survive each day to the next is through fucking, doing unheard-of combinations of drugs, or waiting for their turn with Neva.
Neva, née Karen Strand, the almost-titular lesbian (The Lesbian was the original title of the book, until the publisher made Vollmann change it after "more than a year" of "unanimous pressure"), is a "sexualized female Jesus . . . tremendously damaged, but radically powerful thanks to unstinting self-sacrifice." Her childhood is sexually humiliating and abusive, all at the hands of women and girls (her incestuous mother, an eating disorder she picks up from ditto, homophobic bullies at school, then her first lesbian lover, who is much older than her and lurks the high-school hallways to cruise for virgins). When her lover dumps her, she suffers unspeakably, in an ordinary way. She has become "the lesbian" by now, partly due to the homophobic taunts of her classmates, partly due to a breathtaking metaphor/transformation sequence of "golden-winged, high-breasted, gilt-robed Victory" and "divine Cybele." Then, in the most powerful passage in the book for me, a torturous ritual ordeal on women's land renames and transforms her into a goddess of love, both blessed and cursed to love and be loved by others until she is "hollowed out":
Neva, née Karen Strand, the almost-titular lesbian (The Lesbian was the original title of the book, until the publisher made Vollmann change it after "more than a year" of "unanimous pressure"), is a "sexualized female Jesus . . . tremendously damaged, but radically powerful thanks to unstinting self-sacrifice." Her childhood is sexually humiliating and abusive, all at the hands of women and girls (her incestuous mother, an eating disorder she picks up from ditto, homophobic bullies at school, then her first lesbian lover, who is much older than her and lurks the high-school hallways to cruise for virgins). When her lover dumps her, she suffers unspeakably, in an ordinary way. She has become "the lesbian" by now, partly due to the homophobic taunts of her classmates, partly due to a breathtaking metaphor/transformation sequence of "golden-winged, high-breasted, gilt-robed Victory" and "divine Cybele." Then, in the most powerful passage in the book for me, a torturous ritual ordeal on women's land renames and transforms her into a goddess of love, both blessed and cursed to love and be loved by others until she is "hollowed out":
It continued until she could begin to feel those things without distaste, and then, presently, to feel them in her own way, down within a certain darkness far deeper than not believing in herself. And the old lady cut away from her the things which should be cut from her, Karen's self dissolving like a cedar cone half gone in the moss of that tree's own root.
One morning the girl, who had been starved, penetrated and injured until she repeatedly soiled herself, opened her eyes to ask: Am I a bad person?
No.
Why has my life been so sad?
You never deserved it, but now you need to live it.
She was in her mother's house, that low dark place where all that she could see was the past.
Be patient, honey, said the old woman, recommencing to slap and beat her.
She stayed faithfully with the old lady until the end, meanwhile loving all the rest. It took not much longer than a summer. (Never forget your feelings, the old lady had warned.) Now the mourners were coming out onto a rock-walled promenade of dark moss, shaded by logs and Pacific madrones whose peeling-barked, reddish-brown skeletal arms clicked and rustled as the lesbian looked out at the blue-green sea and hump-backed forest hills. Swaying, she wept a trifle—because she could never help getting attached. Perhaps she should have wept more, but how could any goddess emote in proportion to her powers? (With a smile that might have been a grimace, E-beth had said: You'll never cry over anyone else the way you're torturing yourself over me. You know why? I was your first; that's all.—And Karen tried to remember how much she had cried over her mother.) The other women held her up and drew forward so that they all kept walking steadily to the edge of the grave. Reba led them in singing the song of names as they stripped the old woman's corpse. Each of them kissed it. Then they gently lowered it into the mucky wormy hole.
The love she bestows on the patrons of the bar, by going to bed with them just the way they like, listening to their woes, and casting the light of her loving gaze on them, grows in equivalent proportion with her suffering. She truly does love everyone, and understands them perfectly, and wants them to love others the way they do her. Everyone worships and adores her, in the extractive, desperate, hysterical love of an audience for a movie star or a supplicant for a goddess, while not knowing or understanding a thing about her (they rarely ask questions, and when they do, Neva reveals nothing). As time goes on, they begin to suffer physical symptoms of withdrawal and illness (fever, chills, swollen glands, diarrhea) from her absence when she leaves them to love the next (she's in demand enough to have had to set up "turns," which characters trade, barter with, and sometimes generously give up to those more in need). She grows weary, but she never says no to anyone who needs her, and everyone needs her:
We're all proud of you. But when we pray, how often do our prayers get answered?
I don't know. Not all the time.
So you don't have to say yes all the time.
But I want to.
That's why you're a goddess. Now you know. They're going to come to you with offerings. And the very best they give you is, oh, my. Well, sweetie...
While Neva is the central figure of the book, and her Christlike early life, ascension, ministry, and death create its structure, the character I kept thinking about, the most troubled and the most troubling, is Judy.
Judy is a trans woman (who as you can see is mostly referred to as "the transwoman," all one word, in the same way that Neva is primarily called "the lesbian" and another character is called "the straight man," but, you know, the former is a leeetle more loaded) who checks every box for the cliché depiction of abject transfeminine existence. She's a suicidally needy, emotionally vampiric creep who gloms onto any cis women at any bar she can find and begs them to tell stories of their childhood, to gain questionably sexual gratification at her own fantasy of having grown up as a girl. Her main love interest, apart from Neva whom she worships, is a repulsive retired cop and alcoholic who beats her, degrades her, viciously deadnames her, and who initially met her through a stop-and-frisk years ago that turned my stomach to read. He even turns her against Neva, as part of his investigative vendetta against the latter for the mysterious power she has over everyone, and Judy submits.
She's described as fat, sloppy, needing to take a shower and brush her teeth, a petty thief from the purses and medicine cabinets of her lovers, life's eternal victim at her own hands, someone who drugs and begs women so they won't say no to her, a lowlife compulsive masochist who, we are told, can get her sexual needs met by being forced off her HRT and gang-raped in prison. The tragic part is that, as a character, her emotional landscape is so painfully relatable and depicted with such clear-eyed and intense reality. She's pathetically in need of love, emotionally voracious yet cavernously empty, and deluding herself about the potential of her dreams (haven't we all been there?). Her life and inner world are depicted with just as much attention and care as any other character, if not more—the passage where another character seems to enter Judy's skull on an ayahuasca trip and sees its interior as "a grand stone basilica whose eyes were high narrow windows, colored by the stained glass of Judy's thoughts" is particularly lovely. But when you step back and think about her as a fiction that someone chose to invent, the ever-higher-stacking tropes of transmisogyny make the taste in your mouth get worse and worse.
She's described as fat, sloppy, needing to take a shower and brush her teeth, a petty thief from the purses and medicine cabinets of her lovers, life's eternal victim at her own hands, someone who drugs and begs women so they won't say no to her, a lowlife compulsive masochist who, we are told, can get her sexual needs met by being forced off her HRT and gang-raped in prison. The tragic part is that, as a character, her emotional landscape is so painfully relatable and depicted with such clear-eyed and intense reality. She's pathetically in need of love, emotionally voracious yet cavernously empty, and deluding herself about the potential of her dreams (haven't we all been there?). Her life and inner world are depicted with just as much attention and care as any other character, if not more—the passage where another character seems to enter Judy's skull on an ayahuasca trip and sees its interior as "a grand stone basilica whose eyes were high narrow windows, colored by the stained glass of Judy's thoughts" is particularly lovely. But when you step back and think about her as a fiction that someone chose to invent, the ever-higher-stacking tropes of transmisogyny make the taste in your mouth get worse and worse.
(By the way, the only figures more eager to deadname Judy than her sadistic john are the book's mainstream reviewers: LA Times, NY Times, Alta, Publishers Weekly. Good look, everyone.)
The whole time I was reading, I was arguing with myself about the "true" origin/purpose of this intense transmisogyny. Vollmann has a history of crossdressing and exploring gender fluidity in his work, part of which I think was done purposely to inform his characterization of Judy. Is a crossdressing straight male author "in conversation with" (as they say) transfemininity? It's not really my place to make that kind of call... but, I guess, nor is it my place to let Vollmann off the hook, or "excuse" some of the most appalling instances of what I can't help but feel is garden-variety transmisogyny ("Who can say why this withdrawn, dishonest little boy was not hostile, in which case his lies, then his threats, might have matured into rape and murder? Fortunately for society, he was self-hating like Karen Strand").
Another disturbing factor to grapple with comes at the climax of the book, in which Neva's sexual history of incestuous child abuse reverberates from past to present. I'm still at a loss to understand how the climax fits into the rest of the story, how it fits into Neva's life story, """what it's trying to say""" about CSA and lesbianism, whether it's """trying to say""" anything at all... I was dismayed to see that not a single reviewer of the dozen I read attempted to tackle this, whether mainstream or internet-posted. So, with all the beauties of this book, there are a lot of disturbing uglinesses as well.
However comma. Turning to the afterword and the extensive source notes, I discover that Vollmann has both earnestly anticipated and disarmed a politically correct reader's critique of the ~problematic~ components of his work. He is clearly a sensitive and attentive writer, which already showed in the way he inhabits the inward realities of all his characters, from the strangest to the most abject; but the afterword and notes show that he's also done extensive research to contextualize and ground his characters & their world in real people's lives and politics. Judy's hideous biography is "partially constructed from memoirs in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and partially from interviews, all seasoned with appropriations from Judy Garland's life." Her constant deadnaming is even revealed to have an artistic intent: the historical Judy Garland was born Frances Gumm; her parents wanted a boy, and early in her childhood called her Frank.
The source notes are a luscious feast of all the references, inspirations, epigraphs, and "mutilations" (his word) that stud his work, organized in chapter order so you can easily go diving. Weirdly, the source notes also contain "more book," in the voice of the narrator and revealing additional character bits and information that weren't in the main text; this part was very exciting to me, and I felt that he was doing something new and very interesting.
In the afterword, he makes what I suppose is the work's thesis statement:
This is a tale about the violation of boundaries, and about those strategies, inspiring, pathetic, sacrificial, unhealthy and otherwise, through which the violated try to go on living.
Maybe a book that relies so intensely on its surrounding materials for a final context can't be called a success. (And I'm still going back and forth on the transmisogyny, which is far more extensive and severe than I've enumerated here; I would love to talk about it with someone else who's read the book. Not to mention the way the book handles race in general and Shantelle in particular, which I haven't even touched on on account of being underqualified.) But even with all that, it still stands on its own as a cruel and beautiful work of art, violating to read and comforting to the violated, and I still can't help but give it anything other than 5 stars.
