Night Night Fawn

Barbara Rosenberg, a terminally ill woman in her seventies, lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's East Sixty-ninth Street in 2011, sustained by OxyContin and cared for intermittently by the estranged adult child she still calls her daughter. The novel unfolds through Barbara's confessional memoir, present-day diary entries, archival documents, and a final third-person section, weaving together decades of family history, class aspiration, and a mother's refusal to accept her child's identity. Running through it all is a central surreal element: Barbara's child is physically transforming into a large, ragged bird, and Barbara cannot tell whether this is real, a hallucination, or a punishment.

The novel opens with Barbara investigating strange noises in her apartment, armed with tweezers. She discovers her dishwasher is running but then encounters a figure with a familiar face and a large, hawk-like beak where its nose should be. The figure opens its beak and says, "Mom." The next morning, the child arrives looking mostly human, bringing a green shake. Barbara notices a feather protruding from the child's waistband and concludes she was not dreaming. She reflects on having expelled her child from the family in the 1990s, unable to accept a child who wore combat boots, refused lipstick, and lived as a queer, masculine person. Barbara told everyone the child was still dating a high school boyfriend. Now terminally ill, she has been forced to accept help from the very person she once disowned. She frames her confessional writing as a forced apology, written in her child's language, Marxism.

Barbara's memoir begins with the funeral of her mother-in-law, Blanchie Rosenberg, in Brooklyn in 1983, which Barbara calls the beginning of the end. Standing over the coffin, Barbara connects a weeklong argument with her 11-year-old child over the film Flashdance to a deeper realization. The child's obsession with a corduroy blazer from the closet of Barbara's husband, Stephen Rosenberg, and the child's offer to search under Blanchie's body with a confident "I got this" (30) confirm what Barbara has long feared: Her child believes she can dress her way out of femaleness. Though the novel makes clear through Barbara's own account that her child is a transgender man, Barbara's persistent use of "daughter" reflects her refusal to accept this identity, and this refusal drives the novel's central tension.

The funeral becomes a farce over a missing photograph of Saul's sons that was supposed to be buried with Blanchie. Saul, Stephen's brother and a garment industry contractor, silently accuses Barbara of tampering with the casket. Barbara urges Stephen, a timid deputy health director for New York City, to search the body. He finds the photo, but Saul breaks down sobbing because his son Leon has been accepted to a pre-med program and Saul can never tell his dead mother. Barbara retreats in tears, not over Blanchie but over her child, whom she sees as headed for a "gender disaster" that Stephen refuses to acknowledge.

Sugar Becker, Barbara's oldest friend and head writer at The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, arrives at the funeral in a mink coat that intensifies Barbara's envy. The two have been close since the High School of Performing Arts, where their friendship deepened over a shared love of film. Their lives diverged sharply, however: Sugar rose to television prominence while Barbara worked as a receptionist, and the asymmetry quietly poisoned the relationship.

Barbara traces her courtship with Stephen to the mid-1960s, when she worked at Rosemere Trucking, a garment-district operation run by Stephen's uncle Abe. She briefly dated Saul before meeting Stephen, a medical student with soft eyes. At Lundy's restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Stephen confessed he had fainted during a surgical exercise and announced his intention to pursue public health rather than practice medicine, a decision Barbara recognized as the death of her dreams of upward mobility. Despite this, she took Stephen to see Exodus at the Kings Theatre, where she gave him a hand job in the back row. Stephen proposed immediately afterward, and Barbara, caught between fury at his modest ambitions and attraction to his gentleness, accepted.

In parallel with the memoir, Barbara's present-day diary entries document her deteriorating condition. The bird reads her "gay Marxist sci-fi erotica" as a bedtime story. Barbara witnesses its fuller transformation: enormous taupe-colored wings, a nictitating membrane (a translucent third eyelid) over its eye, feathered fingertips. On a car ride home from the hospital, Barbara tells the bird, "I didn't give birth to an ugly freak. You're the biggest mistake of my life" (162), then tries to throw herself from the car on the FDR Drive. The bird calmly pulls the door shut and locks it.

Barbara recounts the family's 1983 posting to Israel, where Stephen worked at Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan. Barbara took her child daily to a community pool where Israeli adolescents mocked the child's appearance and gender presentation; Barbara secretly welcomed this harassment. Years later, during a car ride, Barbara's child announced, "I think I'm gay," then corrected Barbara's grammar and began reading aloud from Marx's Capital. At a lunch with Saul, who had become a coordinator for Sar-El, a volunteer program supporting the Israeli military, Barbara conceived a plan: She would send her child to an Israeli army base before college, hoping the environment would correct the child's queerness.

Barbara's present-day narrative reaches a crisis when she loses control of her bowels and, in a separate episode, falls from her bed and cannot get up. The bird insists on calling Jewish Family Services (JFS), which Barbara interprets as a death sentence, since JFS's arrival signals to the building that a resident is dying. Sugar Becker then reappears in Barbara's doorway, apparently summoned by a phone call Barbara does not remember making. Sugar bathes Barbara with rosewater body wash in a scene of startling intimacy, sends the JFS nurse away by claiming to be Barbara's wife, and the two women begin reconnecting. Barbara reveals what destroyed their friendship: After a dinner at The Ginger Man, Sugar left behind a notebook containing a character study of "Fawn Dushotsky (aka Barbara)," a portrait of Barbara as a woman of "thwarted potential" with a "calcified smile," compared unfavorably to Barbra Streisand. Barbara realized she had been Sugar's material, not her equal.

Part IV shifts to documents revealing the child's fate. Diary entries from April 1988 show the child, whose name is Jordana, falling in love with S., a Trotskyist senior at Wesleyan University. S. introduces Jordana to Marxist theory, including the concept of vogelfrei, a German term meaning "bird-free" that describes the dispossessed wanderers produced when capitalism expelled serfs from common lands. S. proposes a road trip reading Marx's Capital, but the next entry states: "I am not taking the road trip. My mother has told me I will do no such thing. Instead I am being sent somewhere terrible and clarifying" (254). Letters from Abe document Jordana's refusal to participate at the Sar-El base until a terse communication reports her last known location as the Ben Gurion departures lounge. Further entries trace Jordana's flight to San Francisco, where she pursued S., worked at Sparky's Diner in the Castro, and bought a Kawasaki motorcycle. A county records document, dated July 10, 1988, lists the effects of "Jordana Rosenberg" under the heading "MOTORCYCLE FATALITY." The novel leaves this central ambiguity unresolved: These documents establishing Jordana's death in 1988 coexist with the rest of the novel, in which the bird is Barbara's active caretaker in 2011.

Part V shifts to third-person narration, referring to Barbara as "Fawn," the name from Sugar's character study. Fawn lies alone during a hurricane, watching Ina Garten on the Food Network and arguing with her absent child's imagined voice. The bird appears in the window frame, enormous and scabby-clawed, backlit by lightning, and hops onto the bed. It grasps Fawn's neck with its beak, pulls her close, then grips her feet in its claws and carries her through the open window into the storm. They ascend above Yorkville, above the city lights, into an aurora of violet light. The bird mouths "Night night" as Fawn's atoms sing off her skin and she dissolves, "whistling on her own through the violet sea" (282).