LEAN CAT, SAVAGE CAT

A raging tour of Berlin’s demimonde with a very witty, super bright, somewhat lost trans woman named Charli.

As Joseph’s sophomore novel opens, Charli is in London doing a reading of her short story about a young girl who meets David Bowie in a grocery store, her voice projected through a megaphone from behind a purple tapestry on which she has handstitched all 10,000 words of her master’s thesis in the very same shade of purple: “Nigella Lawson came to the private view of our graduate show, and said it looked like something she’d hang in her own sitting room.” That’s Nigella’s only appearance in this edgy, often viciously funny romp of a novel, but the spirit of David Bowie looms large. Charli is hoping to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Romy Haag, the trans disco singer who was Bowie’s longtime lover, but her life takes a major detour when she meets an ultra-cool, extra dry, androgynously beautiful musician named Alexander Geist that night in the bar. He’s off to Berlin to become the next Bowie himself, and on a whim, Charli joins him. Joseph’s head-spinning account of the rise and fall of Alexander and Charli is absolutely stuffed with nightlife, name-checking, drugs, graphic sex, smart details, and hilarious sentences. Even the rather overwhelmed reader will find many things to enjoy along the way. At one point, Charli is worried she has a headache coming on, “so [she] took a few Diazepam and nibbled on a chicken stock cube”—truly, a great life hack. Her lament that she’s thrown her lot “for so long with such a bastard and [she] had nothing but a paranoid personality disorder to show for it” is ready to put on a T-shirt. There’s a large cast of supporting characters whose subplots are hard to keep straight and a little distracting, but then there will be one of those brilliant sentences to keep you hurtling along.

For readers in the know, a sure thrill; for the rest, a book that can make you slightly cooler just by reading it.