NIGHT NIGHT FAWN

A dying Jewish woman on the Upper East Side struggles with her relationship with her queer child, her former best friend, and her memories.

Rosenberg’s sophomore effort is quite a departure from its predecessor, the 18th-century historical novel Confessions of the Fox (2018). It combines manic Jewish-flavored humor à la Joshua Cohen or Tova Reich with a surrealist avian element à la Marie-Helene Bertino with a boundary-pushing satire of homophobia that floats somewhere in the universe of Benedict Nguyen and Sacha Baron Cohen. A self-described yenta from Flatbush, Barbara Rosenberg lies bedridden in her apartment at Second Avenue and East 69th Street, high off her gourd on OxyContin, reviewing her life story and its many disappointments, framed as “my confession, my apology, my prayer” to Karl Marx, “god of impossible things.” In the words of her erstwhile best friend Sugar Becker, “if Barbra Streisand had been tragically prevented from becoming the star that she was meant to be, and [was] consigned to starring only on the stage of a small rent-controlled apartment overlooking an exhaust shaft”—that would be our heroine. Her delirium proceeds apace as she becomes certain that her child, one Jordana Rosenberg, has turned into a giant bird, and reels through scenes including her mother-in-law’s funeral, movie dates with her late husband, and benighted shopping expeditions with the menswear-loving Jordana, whom she eventually whisked from the gates of Wesleyan University—“which I don’t know if you know, but is a not-so-elite place populated entirely by lesbians”—to an army camp in Israel. This leads to a shocking plot twist and a coda taking the novel in an unexpected direction. Among the pleasures along the way are the author’s many exuberant descriptions of smells, for example, “that sharp peculiar scent of a family: the animal musk of two mouth-breathing adults, the sweet synthetic lemon of Jean Naté After Bath Splash evaporating off the night-cooled flesh of my arms, my daughter’s wet cornflake breath, & the smoky off-gas of the cracked rubber feet of her pajamas.” Rosenberg somehow secretes the hints of genuine emotion that runs beneath the book’s generally broad approach in these pointillist descriptions.

This nonlinear narrative is part rant, part rave, part extended Jewish joke, part queer, Marxist fever dream.