A review by zacharyfoote
Your Face in Mine by Jess Row
2.0
in my adult life, i’ve never been so naîve as to believe we live in a post-racial society, but the last two months or so, with the events that’ve unfolded about a half-hour’s drive away from the somewhat homogeneous town i live in, confirm we’re even farther away than i thought. for the first two weeks, i kept very close tabs on the situation in ferguson, fascinated in one sense by the righteous anger the community articulated in response to such a blithely racist, unselfcritical institution. and then i felt repulsed at myself, because in spite of all that i just fucking sat there, i sat there and watched feeds into the late night and then i feel asleep and woke up and went to work, where my co-workers said the same blithely racist things about the protestors and belittled their causes from afar. and i said almost nothing at all in response, offered no riposte except a weak rhetorical question here and there, and adopted a thousand-yard stare when someone broached the subject with another one of their self-satisfied Hot Takes. i let guilt and hand-wringing and self-loathing again consume fierce underpinnings of solidarity. by virtue of my relative invisibility and mobility and privilege, i could and did hide my real feelings and still lived without the nagging fear that i might be harassed or debased or extrajudicially murdered at the hands of another person, another person who wields a nominal power, who believes Hard Work gives him baseline license to use it forcefully when he harbors the delusion that those who are less powerful might take it away from him.
it was around this time, when i started taking stock of my concerned whiteboi inaction, that i started your face in mine. i found myself glancing at the photo on the back cover: a studious-looking, kind of burly white dude. intense stare. groomed beard. careful shadow to hide a regressing hairline. could be me in fifteen years. the conceit of jess row’s book hinges on “racial dysphoria,” which sounds like it simultaneously could and couldn’t be a thing. at the book’s outset, our widowed protagonist, kelly, moves back to baltimore from china and runs into his old school friend, martin, in a parking lot. only instead of the jewish kid kelly always knew, the man staring back at him is black.
still here? okay.
martin agrees to explain to kelly the basis for, and the process of, his racial reassignment. in exchange, he wants his old friend, who knows about his life birth assignment and the paradigm-shifting trauma both of them faced, to use his meager journalistic background to frame the narrative into something the public will find more digestible. martin’s taped confessions feel genuine, like a document of a true dysphoria.
it’s weird, however, that row reaches toward gender dysphoria as a one-to-one reference point for his characters’ feelings. it’s weird that he doesn’t examine that in greater depth, that he doesn’t try to pick it apart and study it as he does with other aspects of the idea. still weirder is how his characters, who all seem to have the germ of his own education and “progressiveness,” flippantly use the term “transsexual” (even martin). that notwithstanding, gender and race, it seems to me, are similar constructs, but they aren’t the same. martin (and, perhaps by extension, row) some baseline assumptions made about the possibilities of gender dysphoria to sell his existence to the rest of the world. eventually this leads to an interesting, if muted, running commentary on capital and identity.
that's but an example of the ideas row seems to three-quarter-ass in service to a taut story. row metes out engaging story changes and different perspectives in his dialogue - in fact, the conversations his characters have are often the novel’s high points. kelly’s own traumas are also tenderly written but not overwrought. but by the last 70 pages or so, row tries high-concept and higher tension, and it starts to deflate like a leaky balloon.
it sounds like i’m dumping on this book, but i want to like it. it’s an ambitious idea. but it’s just quite not dense enough, or long enough, or authoritative enough to navigate intersectionality in the ways i want it to. as a white cis dude with progressive pretensions, i want a book like this to straight up flip the table on me instead of offering my own tepid platitudes.
it was around this time, when i started taking stock of my concerned whiteboi inaction, that i started your face in mine. i found myself glancing at the photo on the back cover: a studious-looking, kind of burly white dude. intense stare. groomed beard. careful shadow to hide a regressing hairline. could be me in fifteen years. the conceit of jess row’s book hinges on “racial dysphoria,” which sounds like it simultaneously could and couldn’t be a thing. at the book’s outset, our widowed protagonist, kelly, moves back to baltimore from china and runs into his old school friend, martin, in a parking lot. only instead of the jewish kid kelly always knew, the man staring back at him is black.
still here? okay.
martin agrees to explain to kelly the basis for, and the process of, his racial reassignment. in exchange, he wants his old friend, who knows about his life birth assignment and the paradigm-shifting trauma both of them faced, to use his meager journalistic background to frame the narrative into something the public will find more digestible. martin’s taped confessions feel genuine, like a document of a true dysphoria.
it’s weird, however, that row reaches toward gender dysphoria as a one-to-one reference point for his characters’ feelings. it’s weird that he doesn’t examine that in greater depth, that he doesn’t try to pick it apart and study it as he does with other aspects of the idea. still weirder is how his characters, who all seem to have the germ of his own education and “progressiveness,” flippantly use the term “transsexual” (even martin). that notwithstanding, gender and race, it seems to me, are similar constructs, but they aren’t the same. martin (and, perhaps by extension, row) some baseline assumptions made about the possibilities of gender dysphoria to sell his existence to the rest of the world. eventually this leads to an interesting, if muted, running commentary on capital and identity.
that's but an example of the ideas row seems to three-quarter-ass in service to a taut story. row metes out engaging story changes and different perspectives in his dialogue - in fact, the conversations his characters have are often the novel’s high points. kelly’s own traumas are also tenderly written but not overwrought. but by the last 70 pages or so, row tries high-concept and higher tension, and it starts to deflate like a leaky balloon.
it sounds like i’m dumping on this book, but i want to like it. it’s an ambitious idea. but it’s just quite not dense enough, or long enough, or authoritative enough to navigate intersectionality in the ways i want it to. as a white cis dude with progressive pretensions, i want a book like this to straight up flip the table on me instead of offering my own tepid platitudes.