Mothers who just don’t understand have been a fixture in literature since literature was invented. Hamlet’s mom marries the man who murdered his dad. Mrs. Bennet is “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper,” a perpetually wrong voice throughout “Pride and Prejudice.” Usually, these characters are antagonists in their children’s stories. “Night Night Fawn,” Jordy Rosenberg’s occasionally exhausting but ultimately rewarding follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel, “Confessions of the Fox,” flips that familiar structure around: Barbara Rosenberg, terminally ill and accompanied only by her Marxist trans son whom she despises, is the narrator.
She’s writing a deathbed memoir which makes up nearly all of “Night Night Fawn.” She frames it, in an address to her son, as “[m]y confession, my apology, my prayer,” but it’s quickly clear that it’s none of the three. Instead, it’s a long parade of grievances and resentments that have been festering for decades. She opens her memoir in 1983 at her mother-in-law’s funeral. On that particular day she fights with her brother-in-law over a missing photo, remarks repeatedly on the deceased’s “enshrivelment,” and is obsessed with stopping her then-11-year-old trans son J (whom she exclusively misgenders and calls Jordana) from seeing “Flashdance” or wearing a corduroy blazer. The memoir, moving back and forth through time, persists in this register for the duration.
Interspersed between sections are italicized notes in the fictional present of 2012, often timestamped in the blurry very-late-night or very-early-morning hours. Here, Barbara, consistently high on OxyContin, perceives her son as a bird. There is a fleeting apology in these pages — ”I am sorry about earlier. And by ‘earlier’ I mean this morning … & earlier as in all of it. Your whole life. My whole life” — but she immediately takes it back in the next entry. Those sections are consumed, as well, by her complaints of mistreatment.
Everyone she’s ever met bears some responsibility for ruining her life and, as a self-described “yenta,” a Yiddish word for a meddling gossip, she’s more than willing to share. In Barbara’s late-mid-century world of New York Jews there are, basically, two types of people: Zionists and Marxists.
To her, the former are virtuous but annoying in their failure to fit her ideal and the latter are just annoying. These are rendered less as political ideologies than as religious beliefs. “The Jewish God doesn’t do miracles. Though apparently Karl Marx does,” she says early on. Similarly, there are only glimpses of Israel as a nation with a government and citizens. To Barbara’s husband, Stephen, and his brothers, service to Israel is the action through which they can become who they’re meant to be. Barbara believes that the Israelis they encounter on their trips are cruel and conservative enough to bully her son into the woman she wishes he was.
Of course, neither devotion to Marx nor devotion to Israel can bring the salvation she — or anyone — seeks. She’s been sold a bill of goods. One imagines the dismissed Jewish God disappointed and muttering “I tried to tell you.”
“Night Night Fawn” is relentless in this way. Barbara recounts the many cruelties she rains down on her child and the many betrayals and transgressions beset upon her. Despite this, largely due to the propulsive voice Rosenberg gives to Barbara, the book remains entertaining and never descends into gratuitously punishing territory. Barbara often writes with a punchy, specific flare, like this reflection on what it’ll be like to manage on Stephen’s modest public service salary: “Was this going to be my lot in life, I wondered. A rhinestone-crusted faker attempting to maintain a fifteen-foot perimeter around myself at all times in the zoo of humanity that is every avenue east of Third?”
That humorous style has a heavy weight on its shoulders. There isn’t much conventional dramatic tension to pull readers through “Night Night Fawn.” From the beginning, Barbara is dying, almost entirely alone. And from the beginning, there’s not much mystery as to why: She is a hateful, obsessed, selfish person who only regrets that her hatefulness, obsessiveness, and selfishness didn’t lead to her desired outcomes.
Rosenberg doesn’t eschew the standard pleasures of a novel for no reason, though. The book’s epigraph comes from philosopher Gillian Rose’s book “Mourning Becomes the Law.” Writing about “Schindler’s List,” “Shoah,” and other Holocaust works, she says, “Let us make a film in which the representation of Fascism would engage with the Fascism of representation. A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos. … [W]hy should it not be possible to produce a dialectical lyric about such a character?”
For all her faults, Barbara isn’t in the SS, but she is a mother hoping her child will return from Israel “cured” of “the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit,” and it feels close enough that the analogy sticks. Rose’s question isn’t a rhetorical question, though Barbara’s story in her own words is far from conclusive.
Instead of an attachment to her, there’s an attachment to the little flickers of humanity that appear before she snuffs them out. Instead of wanting what she wants, the reader wonders why she wants what she wants and why, in her own telling, she isn’t more curious about what made her this way. As “Night Night Fawn” twists toward its end and some blurry elements come into focus, Rosenberg leaves the right questions unanswered.
NIGHT NIGHT FAWN
By Jordy Rosenberg
One World, 304 pages, $29
Bradley Babendir is a fiction writer and critic in Somerville.