There is a long tradition, in fiction, of representing characters whose politics we do not share, and even fervently oppose. I take some inspiration here from authors like Shibli and Bolaño, who have done remarkable work braving literary nearness to repressive and reactionary characters—fascists, colonizers, collaborators, etc. These characters are part of the play of forces of lived history, and so sometimes a fictional endeavor finds itself necessarily in proximity to them. Doing this can explore not only the contexts that inform authoritarian politics, but also the perhaps more disturbing question of emotional attachment to these positions in the first place. How, for example, do people become so hysterical over queer and trans people that this hatred and phobia overtakes their lives? These ideologies are inescapably libidinal—there’s a degree of cruel pleasure that is bound up in far-right fantasies, and fiction excels at illuminating this, and at subjecting these fantasies to the withering light of satire.

So we don’t have to fight transphobic and far-right fantasies only with sober corrections. We can lampoon them, we can mock them, and we can pilfer and scavenge their rhetoric and mash it up and turn it into something else.

The novel focuses on the 1960s-1980s, largely in New York City. It ranges from the 60’s Jewish-mafia-adjacent milieu that the narrator, Barbara, comes up in - Flatbush, midtown, and the trucking and garment industries - to the rise of the cosmetic surgery industry in the 70’s and 80’s, in which Barbara works as a receptionist. There are louche peeks into the world of Manhattan private girls’ schools, and a tumultuous dive into the late 80’s, the end of the Cold War and the maelstrom of the AIDS epidemic, as Barbara cements her fanatical opposition to the mainstreaming of gay politics.

Throughout, we are following Barbara, her friends, husband, and in-laws, all of whom had come of age in the 1950s and whose politics were shaped by the Israeli state project. The book is asking questions like: How did American teenagers who otherwise cared about things like bobby socks and James Dean, and otherwise did not think or care about statecraft, become obsessed with colonizing Palestine, and not only that, how did they normalize this obsession within the nuclear family and propagate it (or attempt to propagate it) in their children? Ultimately, this novel is representing a character for whom homophobia and transphobia, as well as Zionist aspirations, are completely ordinary, perhaps even unremarkable. Because novels specialize in verisimilitude, they are very good at depicting this kind of unremarkableness - the mundane and routine aspects of cruelty. So for example, routing the novel through Barbara gives the reader a direct window into the absurd self-justifications of transphobes, as well as some of the everyday ways in which colonial systems and racist worldviews have been incubated not just in the settlements on the West Bank, but also within American homes and families in the 20th and 21st centuries.

History is lived in the vernacular—which crucially includes humor, jokes, and bits. For this novel, the comedic register is an important means of evoking the particulars of a specific tristate milieu.  Also, comedy gives us an opportunity to steal back enjoyment from the right. I don’t mean “joy"; I mean something closer to a necessary release of the tension that builds under oppressive regimes. Why shouldn’t we satirize transphobes, homophobes, colonizers? Why shouldn’t we use humor to illuminate history’s most disturbing elements? Why shouldn’t we speak in the comic vernacular to readers about politics that have been held up as being “too complex” for anyone but presidents and prime ministers? Actually, politics is not that complicated, and humor is part of enacting and bringing down to earth what politicians are often eager to represent as out of reach for ordinary people and especially out of our reach in terms of changing. And that’s just not true. Politics is ordinary people. So, while we are committing ourselves to resisting the far-right in all its manifestations, why can’t we laugh at the transphobe’s expense? At the colonizer’s expense?