Nevada - Imogen Binnie

How we live is who we are? True? False? Isn’t it enough that we live? Maybe not when you’re trans. The novel “Nevada” was first published in the USA in 2013, and pre-dates, for example, “Paul Takes the Form Of A Mortal Girl” by Andrea Lawlor (2017) and “Detransition Baby!” by Torrey Peters (2021), two of many, no doubt, American trans writers and writers of trans fiction who will have taken advantage of Imogen Binnie’s opening up of the fiction genre to trans experiences. She says that she was, “so dead set on treating one trans woman’s experience with honesty because I was so fucking exhausted and sad that my own was never treated that way.” “Nevada” was in gestation for some years and on publication did do something to shift American Fiction into a new range of possibilities. It was read and appreciated widely and rallied members of the trans community to declare themselves more fully. All that said the years since 2013 have seen major changes in trans perceptions and the political profile of trans in society, in history even. Two years after its publication Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts” was busting open writing genres and binary distinctions and opening access to many more sub-sections of trans identity. Imogen Binnie responded to the tides of history in 2022 with a new “Afterword” to the novel. This extra text doesn’t entirely counter the ways in which the book is sometimes awkwardly “of its time”, but it does give us a way of rescuing the writing from its context. What dates the book is for example the “how we live” dimension of the daily existence of principal characters Maria and, separately, James. There are the product placements and brand-names and social behaviour, things which change so rapidly in late capitalistic situations. And the narrative is delivered in a stream of “slacker”, sometimes “stoner”, talk which is both timeless and aggravatingly shallow, and you want to say, “Surely there’s a better bullshit going on now?” All the same “Nevada” answered to the experiences of many trans and in many ways. Many of those experiences are still current. The writer deliberately asks and sometimes explores the kind of questions which bother us as trans, mainly round the subject of “Who are we – really (and how do we know)?”. She also inserts reported speeches arguing for and about what society gets right and wrong about trans. Most usefully she takes as her protagonist (Maria being the post-transition and James the potentially pre-transition halves of the same trans individual) someone who is in between the extremes of trans self-discovery – not rich enough to go all the way but half-way there, and awkwardly suspended between full acceptance and self-doubting, still beset by questions about their status in relationships. As we discover (or already know) there is a lot of distance between a James and a Maria and between a Maria and, say, a Julia Serrano and that’s where most trans find themselves, neither entitled nor privileged, but at least more confident and widely acknowledged (and apparently more numerous) than the previous trans generation. For this I for one will welcome both “Nevada” and the American fictions which followed in its wake. What though in the end alienates me from their overall world-view is that, well, it’s not a very wide view nor a very wide world. I have somewhat taken against the pervasive narcissism of the American trans, or at least their fiction. Lawlor and Peters and Binnie all write as though their experience of trans and the way their characters live are the base-line for transgender. In the USA maybe, but in the World….? As I have written many times elsewhere I believe transgender needs a sense of the world, - a concern about, for example, Brazilian sex-workers and Indian hijras and the Embera of Colombia and the refugee trans of Central Asia, and an awareness of the older as well as the younger trans generations and all the trans of all the colours – but it seems that the USA is going through a crisis of its own political and social identity so we may have to leave it to work out its own self-absorption. What this crisis does to its trans-fiction though is to tangle it up in the “how we live” and “who am I really?” dimensions of life. These, partly thanks to the lifestyle preoccupations, the deadbeat-talk and “real-world” dialogue of the writing, resonate with a certain younger generation of averagely-transitioned US trans, but severely reduce this fiction’s ability to think adventurously, and to envision and engender a trans nirvana, that better world which will make it worth taking all this shit for. How we live is not, you know, all we are. I referred to “Nevada” as a novel and categorized it as fiction. The thing about ground-breaking books is that they often have a problem with genre. “Nevada” is actually a personal off-loading in the form of a novel, - it’s made up of “things I learnt that I want to share”, “what I have to say to my younger self”, “what life is really like”, and “the daily things I react to”, and spends quite some time correcting misunderstandings about trans experiences. Its not being a conventional novel isn’t a problem, but we do need a reason to keep reading. There’s not much of a story, - Maria takes a journey, meets James, - only a small cast of characters and no particular epiphany to crown its climax, all of which might be the template for future trans-fiction, but isn’t very dynamic. It does have an ingenious structure which, as Binnie admits in the “Afterword”, is designed to take all the emphasis away from the cliché narrative of sex-change, physically transitioning. The structure is fit for purpose but feels a bit too over-worked to me, as if it was the result of a lot of editorial coaching, and it doesn’t yield much extra understanding. What I, and the world, have to thank Imogen Binnie and “Nevada” for is that it restores complexity to the trans narrative, complexity and self-complication, after a long period of trans-as-vignette and “The Other Me, with Meaning”-style stories. We have already moved on – read it before it’s too late – and it seems as though we have a lot more moving to do. That American fictionalist of a previous generation, Garrison Keillor, quotes Robert Frost - “we are the life that they longed for we bear their visions every day”, and himself writes, “We took a chance when we produced these people and it looks as if we'll have to wait a little longer to see how it comes out”.