THE GREAT MISTAKE by Jonathan Lee

“An exceptional work of historical fiction about one of the key figures in the development of 19th-century New York City.”

the great mistake

man whom Pen both worships and despises. Aiden represents a “trans-father whose shadow [he] wanted to step out of even tho dude was younger.” Unable to handle another perfect post from Aiden on the Gram, Pen decides to place a hex on him, asking his Bushwick roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to help him “curse someone, in both the old ways and the new.” This plan goes awry when a trans man named Blithe Freeman encounters Pen’s curse before Aiden does, and he’s sent deep into the Shadowlands. Enter the Rhiz, an underground trans network, which enlists both Pen and Aiden to find the cursed man and bring him back. The two frenemies set out to rescue Blithe from the Shadowlands, which, despite functioning as a metaphor for deep depression, is physically located in Joshua Tree. The journey is akin to a queer millennial version of The Alchemist, complete with proverbs and personal growth. Pen’s raw reflections on his insecurities as a trans man—“my feet were still sweating from my encounter with the airport scanners. I knew they saw I was missing a big dick”—provide a realness to this dreamlike, allegorical narrative. The attempts to orient the story in the future, from subway cars that glow with Bio-meter readings to vague mentions of climate-related natural disasters, only serve to distract from a more powerful reality: For underrepresented communities, the everyday experience can be alien enough.

This is a modern allegory with a unique voice—searching, questioning, vulnerable, witty.

THE GREAT MISTAKE

Lee, Jonathan Knopf (304 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 15, 2021 978-0-525-65849-8

An exceptional work of historical fiction about one of the key figures in the development of 19th-century New York City.

In November 1903, on Friday the 13th, Andrew Haswell Green was shot

dead in front of his Park Avenue home. Largely forgotten now, he had been essential to the establishment of many of the city’s parks, museums, and bridges and to the linking of its five boroughs into Greater New York. As he did in High Dive (2016), Lee sets up two narratives: one following highlights of Green’s life up to the murder and one on the police investigation afterward. Born in 1820 into a Massachusetts farming family, young Green realizes that he doesn’t grip an ax the right way, that he has “no interest in girls.” At 14, he is seen almost kissing another boy. (Present-day readers may find the allusions to his sexuality euphemistic or otherwise indirect, but that is period appropriate and could mean the historical record lacks more-explicit references.) Shortly after that incident, Green is sent to New York to work in a general store, where future New York Gov. Samuel Tilden appears one day seeking pills for indigestion. They develop a lifelong friendship that will lead to Green’s many civic achievements. Meanwhile, a police inspector stumbles on a clue to the shooting after visiting a bordello whose madam is linked to the case. She provides one of the book’s most colorful sections (and its only significant female character), and she and the inspector dominate the novel’s lighter moments. There also are two very different strands of suspense: in the whodunit, which hinges on an accepted haven for straight male urges, and in the biography, with its question of how a man deals with feelings that don’t fit into the conventional narrative of the time.

A highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace.

HOPE

Levy, Marc Trans. by Dickens-Doyle, Hannah AmazonCrossing (333 pp.) $10.99 paper | May 11, 2021 978-1-5420-2564-5

Fantasy and neuroscience make uneasy bedfellows. In the 1990s, best friends and purported geniuses Josh and Luke are attending an unnamed university in Boston and moonlighting at the sketchy Center, “a private laboratory run by the company Longview, owned in turn by some enigmatic entity,” and headed by the untrustworthy Professor Flinch. The two are making remarkable progress at transferring human consciousness to a computer, which raises the possibility that people might be able to “shrug off death and aging.” Unsettling their friendship is equally gifted science student Hope, who falls into a passionate affair with Josh. Hope is the sort of fictional female free spirit given to buying live lobsters at a restaurant and liberating them back to the sea. “Beautiful Hope, so full of light and life,” also suffers the kind of migraines that, in a novel, don’t bode well for her long-term future. Halfway through, the story jumps 40 years forward, into the life of Melody, a concert pianist who will have a perhaps not too surprising connection to Hope. Because the novel has been translated from French, it’s hard to tell how many of the clichéd expressions are in the original, but there’s certainly an excess of prose about “endless cleavage” and “pale, parted lips.” The harder Levy tries to explain the scientific reasoning behind his plot, the less convincing it becomes. Because the romance between Josh and Hope is so generic, it’s hard to care whether it defies death, and it’s hard to believe that the remarkable discoveries on which the plot rests would have been concealed from the scientific community. With a lighter hand, and enough character development to make the reader care about his protagonists, this might have been a touching fable about the survival of love.

A disappointing attempt to flesh out a fairy tale.