TERRY DACTYL
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Coffee House Press. 260 pages, $18.
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE’s absorbing novel opens on the dancefloor of New York’s Limelight, the iconic nightclub known for its theatricality, excess, and drugs. This beginning invites readers into the world of Terry Dactyl, the trans lesbian narrator whose (mis)adventures are the subject of the tale. Like its heroine, very little about this novel is conventional. It’s told in a conversational stream-of-consciousness style, the action jumps back and forth in time, dialogue is not punctuated, numbered lists appear as part of a story, and a Zoom call is presented as a theatrical script. One sentence can span paragraphs or even pages. These devices produce a swift momentum that drives the narrative forward.
Terry has been raised by lesbian mothers in Seattle, witnessing the AIDS epidemic that killed many of her mothers’ friends. The specter of AIDS haunts the novel. After she moves to New York and drops out of college, Terry immerses herself in a club scene marked by extravagant costuming and heavy drug use. Terry’s chosen family mourns deaths by AIDS, suicide, and drug overdoses as they struggle to navigate a sometimes violent urban terrain with style. Much attention is paid to sartorial ornamentation, including Terry’s wings, a key marker and a central metaphor. Terry’s work at a prestigious Soho art gallery gives Sycamore occasion for much satirical skewering of the New York art world.
The novel’s second half finds Terry back in Seattle in 2020 amid the Covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Sycamore brings her keen observational skills to bear in her treatment of the fears and panic that attended the pandemic. Terry describes the early deaths in nursing homes and on cruise ships and the angry localized mask disputes. Sycamore reinforces the isolation imposed by the pandemic by regularly beginning sentences with the phrase “Things that make me feel less lonely tonight,” followed by a list of locations, sensations, and so on.
Despite the national social-distancing mandate, Terry finds political community in the George Floyd protests that engulfed Seattle in 2020. The irony that protesters are gassed by Seattle’s lesbian mayor—a friend of Terry’s mothers—is not lost on her. She drily notes: “Across the country, we have lesbian mayors, gay mayors, Black mayors, progressive mayors, and all their favorite police chiefs, united in their love of tear gas.” The political demonstrations coincide with the Northwest wildfires to turn Seattle into an environmental hellscape. This circumstance causes Terry to self-referentially quip: “Apparently, when you obsessively refresh the air quality report, this doesn’t improve the air quality.” She later declares: “Yes, I’m delighted to receive an email from my health insurance company with the subject line, ‘Learn about your mental health options,’ and a link that doesn’t work.”
Sycamore’s tongue-in-cheek perspective does much to relieve the intensity of the novel’s events. She playfully interrogates binary thinking using phrases such as “There are two types of galleries” and “There are two kinds of club children.” A dogmatic character says to Terry: “you either believe in the tyranny of the state or you don’t.”
Deadpan humor punctuates Terry’s mother Paula’s response after Terry’s first-grade teachers suspect her of having a learning disability for calling boys “she.” Terry matter-of-factly recalls: “Paula said we live in a world of the universal she, but your school doesn’t understand that.” Later in the novel, upon observing someone in a park using a football as a pillow, Terry remarks: “this might be the first time I’ve found anything even remotely interesting about a football.” Such drollness adds to the pervasive and incisive political commentary to engage readers on several levels at once. Disarmingly, Terry regularly addresses the reader directly and confidentially, using expressions like “I just want to tell you,” “Don’t let me forget,” and “Do you see how it was getting confusing?” This tone produces a beguiling sense of intimacy with the character.
While the novel’s concluding park scenes in 2020 Seattle can feel slow, Terry’s funny, keen perspective carries the day. Not surprisingly, the novel avoids easy resolutions. Instead, it offers a refreshing look at the life of a resilient, clear-eyed survivor who’s living life on her own terms, without apology and with a deep understanding of human inconsistencies and imperfections. Readers can fly through this novel on Terry Dactyl’s wings and land on the earth wiser and satisfied.
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Anne Charles, who lives in Montpelier, VT, cohosts (with her partner) the cable-access show All Things lgbtq.
