XBy Davey Davis
The letter X is the smartest minx in the alphabet. Treasure, crypto, the one we once loved. Pornography, warnings, gender markers above F or M. And now, a strange, near-future Noir title by Davie Davis.
In “X” (novel), X (character) is just a small part of all this, the “nightmare of Dominatrix”, the subject of attachment to Davis’s non-binary narrator (who spends most of his novel anonymously). is.
After an overnight stand of intense sadomasochism at a Brooklyn warehouse party, the narrator sticks to X as a distraction, or perhaps a chance of salvation, as the world falls further into fascism. Mysterious government agencies encourage unwanted people to “export” or voluntarily leave the country. First, they chased “non-white migrants, migrants on the ban list, known communities and Antifa, Jews and Muslims, blacks and brown leftist organizers.” Now they are chasing “drug users, transsexuals, and many poor people.” X has been provided with her export documents and the narrator has (at most) a month to find her. Hunting acts as a distraction from the desolate everyday life of the narrator: the dead-end work they hate, the recent ex-girlfriends they can’t forget, and the fact that they export as quickly as all their friends. The looming conviction that you will be forced to. As the clock ticks, these realities flow deep into the story, no matter how much the narrator tries to ignore.
Like Davis’ first novel “The Room of the Earthquake”, “X” There are sentences that are lyrical, non-linear, and feel like obsidian. It is dark, sharp and shiny. However, here the voice is less poetic and more concise, as in the hard-boiled detective pattern of the classic movie. This is a strange noir world, full of unexplained violence, encyclopedic sexual deviations, and terribly flawed, unreliable, unreliable antiheroes. From time to time, Davis’ styling goes too far and torques the sentence into awkward shapes (“Immediately, like the studyed butterfly pins, I was able to identify where each pain came from, it’s alive. Did you? “), But the overall effect is stunning, the perfect combination of style and subject matter.
Like many of us today, Davis’ narrator has become a civil detective by (partially) the relentless true criminalization of entertainment. Throughout the novel, their obsession with sex and death has a pop culture counterpoint in a talkative podcast where two women are out of breath and discuss horrific murders for millions of audiences. Not all readers can personally identify the story of the novel’s sexual waterboarding, but many readers devour and judge the worst (and often the last) days of someone’s life for entertainment. You will recognize the experience you enjoy. Watching death on TV, movies, podcasts, etc. is now a booming business — our modern Coliseum. Over and over again, the “X” shows how sex and death are intertwined for many, not just BDSM queers from the future.
Indeed, the darkest part of the “X” is not the scene of snuff movies or future fascism. They are what the novel suggests about our present. We are not reading the distant or unlikely future. Sometimes the novel feels like a dispatch from next week. It was when the narrator said, “I didn’t even know how much it had returned, just because the unemployment rate soared and civil rights collapsed.” The “X” records the dystopia that has just arrived, suggesting that there was probably a moment when we were able to take another path.
that moment? it’s snowing. now. now.
The “X” leaves you wondering, just as you leave the narrator. What are you ignoring? What can you not admit to yourself? And is it too late or have you given up anyway?
Hugh Ryan is the author of “When Brooklyn was Strange” and “Women’s Prison.”
X, Davey Davis | 268pp. Catapult | Paper, $ 16.95
