This week, our Free Culture Book Club reads Nevada, chapters 15 to 24.

Pink flowers

To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.

This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.

Nevada

I can’t find any direct, Free-licensed information on this book but the Wikipedia article describes it as follows.

Nevada: A Novel is the debut novel from author Imogen Binnie, released by Topside Press in 2013. Nevada follows the story of Maria Griffiths, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, who embarks on a road trip headed towards the West Coast. In the years following its release, it has been credited by literary critic Stephanie Burt as having starting a transgender literary movement and inspiring authors such as Torrey Peters and Casey Plett.

It goes on to point out that it sold around ten thousand copies before Topside went out of business, leading fans to take on distribution duties until other companies have picked it up more recently.

I should note that we may or may not have a film adaptation coming, though the director recently left the project.

What Works Well?

We see glimmers of either the book that could await us in future chapters or that somebody could plausibly write around the skeleton presented in this story, where the protagonist maybe actually recognizes her faults and tries to deal with them instead of explaining, excusing, and ignoring them.

What Works…Less Well?

What do we mean by less well? Free Culture exists as a special kind of idea. By licensing a work appropriately, the creator gives each of us permission, authority, and power to make the work our own. This section tries to remind us all of that, by indicating areas of the project where you, dear reader, might consider it as an invitation to get involved with the project.
And yes, sometimes complains slip through, too…

How can I put this without hurting a bunch of people’s feelings? I think that I hate Maria, most probably because she rambles like a Freedom Caucus legislator. She seems to pride herself on her political disengagement, finds it offensive when people identify her as a woman (her correct identity) instead of a transgender woman, seems to find it more comforting when people deadname her, and also reads hate into every remotely kind act. She seems to want to gate-keep who gets to “legitimately” think of themselves as transgender, and believes that statistics on violence against transgender women probably got exaggerated somewhere along the way. Everything has an edginess to it that would ring false in junior high school, let alone in an adult who needs to deal with the world. And I, admittedly, don’t have any idea whether this presents supposed good behavior, a parody of bad behavior, a self-hating monologue, foreshadowing, or something unrelated, but do know that I’ve had to tolerate it for about twenty-five thousand words and haven’t appreciated any of it.

Also, this section of the book seems to delight in writing things like the following.

It is like a Beckett play or something. It would be great if this were a Hans Christian Anderson story and he…

To me, this feels like an encouragement to go read something by a more experienced author instead, someone who maybe doesn’t pad every sentence with either profanity or “Yes sure whatever fine sure whatever” and the like.

Maybe related, for a book that bills itself as daring to not bother to explain transgender existence to a presumed cisgender audience, every few chapters, the book seems to do exactly that, as if I accidentally picked up a textbook on the transgender woman’s experience. And it seems like it wants to pretend that Maria has a universal experience of transitioning, which…maybe she does, I don’t know, but I tend to doubt it, if only because so few transgender folks that I’ve had exposure to seemed so aggressively self-absorbed and disinterested in improving political conditions.

Opportunities

Other than buying the book where available, I don’t see any means to contribute.

What’s Adaptable?

I didn’t see anything relevant.

Next

Coming up next week, we’ll continue Nevada, with part One, chapter 25, to part Two, chapter 6.

As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.

Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the book so far?

Credits: The header image is FLOWER 03 - PAINTBRUSH, sp (6-16-11) northeast Nevada by Alan Schmierer, released into the public domain by the photographer. The artist released the actual cover under a non-commercial license.