ENDPAPERS

Savran Kelly draws parallels between 20th- and 21st-century queer history in her first novel.

Dawn Levit is experiencing a quarter-life crisis. She moved to New York after graduating from college, but she arrived just a few months after 9/11, and the city has been transformed by wreckage, debris, and displays of xenophobia. She’s an aspiring artist, but she’s out of ideas. And her relationship with a musician named Lukas is foundering as their gender identities and physical desires are increasingly out of sync. He wants her to be more masculine than she feels; she wants penetrative sex he is unwilling to provide. Her job repairing rare books at the Met is the only aspect of her life that is uncomplicated—or mostly uncomplicated. It’s while she’s rebinding a water-damaged text that she finds a message written on the cover of a vintage lesbian pulp novel—a cover showing a woman holding up a mirror and seeing a man’s face. Her search for the woman who wrote this note leads her to Gertrude Kleber, who left Nazi Germany for New York, where her father worked as a bookbinder. There are parallels between the two women’s lives. In the 1950s, Gertrude had to hide her attraction to other women. As she comes to discover that she feels neither fully feminine nor fully masculine, Dawn finds herself shunned by both lesbians and gay men. And, just as Gertrude found a way to express herself, Dawn launches a collaborative project that makes her feel like an artist again. Gertrude and her friends—the Sapphic Warriors—write and bind stories depicting “the joyful lives we wished we could live” and tucked them inside the dime-store novels that depicted lesbians as tragic deviants. Dawn creates a book-as-installation in which artists imagine a New York in which everyone is free to be their own unique gender. The narrative suffers from slow pacing, a protagonist who is spectacularly self-absorbed and kind of a jerk (she lies to Gertrude about why she tracked her down), and from the fact that Gertrude’s story is so much more interesting than Dawn’s. It is, nevertheless, a salient reminder that there was a time when the word nonbinary was virtually unknown.

An intriguing but uneven debut.