TRANSMUTATION
Stories
By Alex DiFrancesco
Alex DiFrancesco’s eclectic, absorbing first collection, “Transmutation,” captures moments of in-betweenness (often fraught, sometimes magical) that may be especially familiar to transgender people who are not legible, temporarily or purposefully, to others or themselves. In one story, a trans man wears a chest binder and can’t afford top surgery. He’s a server at a restaurant, but does not earn much because “newly bearded, ambiguously gendered people just didn’t get tipped as much as cute girls.” The protagonist’s desire to have top surgery is at odds with both his partner’s wishes and his financial situation, but what “The Ledger of the Deep” hinges on is the careful observation of how people fill their days: watching “Twin Peaks,” cooking a meal, drinking beer on a boat.
Within these direct, straightforward stories are corridors of solitude and reflection. In the opening story, “Inside My Saffron Cave,” 16-year-old Junie lives with their mother and their mother’s abusive new boyfriend. Junie hasn’t started hormones yet, though “it had been five years since I started presenting the way I felt,” they explain in between Snapchatting with their friends and going to the beach alone. Before procuring estrogen from an internet friend, Junie finds comfort in the mysterious figure of the local legend, the Storm Hag. Thankfully, in DiFrancesco’s hands, trans characters are no longer required to be self-serious, suffering, alternately tragic and heroic. Instead, they scroll on Twitter, talk to their friends on the internet and seek alternative forms of kinship.
Empathy for “runaways, escapees, the brutally damned, the unchosen, the cast out” animates several of these horror-inflected stories. “A Little Procedure,” dedicated to Rosemary Kennedy, is told from the perspective of a young woman named Lily whose privileged family forces her to undergo a lobotomy. Afterward, she is no longer “their wild, promiscuous daughter,” DiFrancesco writes, but “someone new entirely … their shrinking violet.” Writing in a detached, dry prose, DiFrancesco conjures an eerie menace with Lily, a deceptively doll-like creation with a desire for revenge.
The author doesn’t shy away from weaving into their work topical issues like racist memes, noncontractual labor and social media cancellations. In “The Disappearance,” an adjunct professor, Kaj, mulls over the latest drama on “Poetry Twitter,” involving an essay by one of his tenured white colleagues, Dr. Allen, publicly lamenting the diminishment of his career while minorities watch theirs ascend. As Dr. Allen ambles down the hallway, Kaj observes that he begins to disappear, “his edges blurred and eroded, a hole of blankness in his forearm.” Later, the tenured professor is inexplicably sucked through a straw and spit out by the adjunct. It sounds ridiculous, and yet somehow it works. Maybe because Dr. Allen’s claims of victimhood are so flimsy. Of course it — he — is sucked up and spit out.
The most surprising story, “The Chuck Berry Tape Massacre,” is told through multiple perspectives and incorporates an interview format. Dedicated to Jeff Mangum, the cryptic lead singer of Neutral Milk Hotel, it intertwines two stories: of an overprotective, paranoid mother of two increasingly isolated young daughters; and of a reclusive songwriter whose band influenced a generation of indie musicians. Before disappearing from the public eye, the songwriter discovers a recording of one of the girls singing to herself and playing a toy piano. Obsessively listening to the tape, “he could hear something real and eternal and human. Some sort of soul in exile and torture.”
Unlike with the cool remove of, say, Rachel Cusk’s fiction, DiFrancesco clearly is not afraid to err on the side of sentimentality. Characters often harbor romantic fantasies of rescuing others. Tears are shed. “We wept and she wept and she and the monsters watched us eat as if we never would again,” one character recalls. “No politeness or prayer, wolves in our hunger.” At the affective core of “Transmutation” is the question of how we can offer shelter for one another’s pain, real and imagined.
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June 08, 2021 at 04:00PM
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Alex DiFrancesco Captures the Fraught Magic of the In-Between - The New York Times
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