XMAS READS FROM TRANSGRESSIVE FICTION

This month's titles come courtesy of ​transgressivefiction.info,
​a great place to discover new and interesting authors. 

THE EXIT MAN by Greg Levin
twitter.com/greg_levin​

       Plot synopsis: Man comes back home because his father is dying, takes over Dad's party supply business, helps terminally ill family friend commit suicide. Grateful family friend gives man some money, and a career is born.
       Man meets suicidal woman on a bridge, talks her down, helps her cover up the murder of her rapist ex-fiance, and a romance is born.
      Man takes woman into the new "exit" business. Woman has her own ideas on expansion. What could possibly go wrong? 
   "I can put up with a lot in a relationship. I'm a broad-minded man, one who realizes that sometimes a girl has to do things like shoot her ex or jump off a bridge or carry out a vendetta on low, lawless men."
        Exit Man is funny, of course, and pleasingly (or disturbingly- depending on your viewpoint) irreverent, but author's dry wit and sardonic asides also point out the hypocrisy of a society where suffering people must turn to an outlaw for compassion and help. 
        Luckily our protagonist and his partner/girlfriend and their terminally ill clients are the ultimate DIYers; doing it for themselves, for each other and for the community at large, and we lucky readers get to tag along! 
​           The ending is a little abrupt, but to be fair, I'm not sure how one would wrap up the various threads neatly and satisfactorily, and this is a minor quibble about a very fine novel. Highly recommended.

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NEVER ANYONE BUT YOU by Rupert Thomson
twitter.com/RupertThomson1

           In pre-WWI France two young girls meet and fall in love. They grow up and move to Paris and become part of the artistic renaissance of the between-wars period; they are present at the birth of Dadaism and Surrealism. As approaching war becomes evident they move to Jersey. During the Nazi occupation they wage their own war of resistance, papering the  island with subversive leaflets.
        Eventually they get caught and sentenced to death, but are saved by the withdrawal of German troops ahead of the allied liberation. 
         One dies not long after, her health ruined. The other lives on for many years until old age prompts her to end her life on her terms.
        "Once dead, I will no longer be aware of being without her. That's why the past eighteen years have been so difficult. It's not true what they say. Time heals nothing."
         A fictional biography of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,   Never Anyone But You is the story of a great love and enduring partnership that spans the two 20th century world wars and the chaotic, socially liberating, artistically fertile period between them.  It is an unsentimental portrait told with restrained, spare, evocative prose, and sheer pleasure to read. Recommended!

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           It is an interesting choice to include Never Anyone But You in the "transgressive  fiction" tent. It contains little of the usual canon; this is not a story of rebellion via drugs, criminality, nihilism or self-destructive decadence. Claude and Marcel defy oppressive norms by creating a happy and long life together, by not internalizing the normative paradigm but designing and defining their own.
          "I refuse to allow myself to be defined by a few biological characteristics. When I stand in a room by myself, I'm not standing there as a woman. I'm a consciousness. An intelligence. Everything else is secondary."
       Society does not grind them under its heel as they rebel to an inevitable, bitter end, they triumph over it.  And that illustrates a broadening definition of transgressive fiction that can only enrich the genre. 
           If the bloated center of a bell curve represents society ("everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," as Emerson tells us), then transgression extends in many directions; sometimes the most subversive act is to flourish and prosper. 

Mary Whealen
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