Rachel Yoder's NIGHTBITCH

Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there- this idea had begun to weigh on her. Of course, it had crossed her mind before, but after her son arrived it took on a new shape, and unwieldy heft, and then even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. And once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable.

Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch is that relative rarity, a novel about which I have precise memories of how I first heard about it. Caitlin Luce Baker, a bookseller who, like me, occasionally crashes the fantastic Two Month Review Podcast, plugged it at the end of this episode.*

I thought it sounded intriguing as hell, but just having blown two months' book budget on other things, I requested that my public library acquire Nightbitch, which seemed like a request that was likely to be granted because the book was making a splash. 

That was two years ago, though! And, well, this site bears witness to how I've spent that time, reading other stuff. I'd all but forgotten about this book when seemingly out of the blue my library announced it had just bought it in June of 2023 and I was first in line to read it. So, yowza! 

It was only when I went browsing for cover images for this here blog post that I finally figured out that the library's belated decision to grant my request wasn't out of the blue at all; Nightbitch is soon to be a major motion picture starring a perfectly cast Amy Adams.

Nightbitch lays out its premise right away. Its heroine, whom we only ever know as "the mother," in lowercase, is a former artist and career woman who is now a full-time stay-at-home mother. We see her constantly reminding herself that this is only because her husband's job pays him more than her "dream job" in the arts was ever going to pay her, a thought-terminating cliche that she employs whenever she catches herself resenting her being trapped in traditional gender roles, thus conveniently sparing her husband the tedious job of doing the reminding and being the bad guy thereby, (which, get ready for the husband). As the story opens she has begun manifesting symptoms that would lead a less rational woman (married to a less reasonable man) to believe she was slowly transforming into a dog, specifically a female dog. As in unexplained and unexpected patches of coarse and bristly hair suddenly appearing on the scruff of her neck, a suggestion of her canine teeth seeming, to her at least, to have gotten longer and sharper, and the odd homicidal urge, or at least an urge to unspecified violence. And the symptoms are worse at night, hence the title. Boom. 

I suppose I should note here that I am not a mother, never wished to be one, am perfectly happy being part of the village, as it were. And this book is a perfect showcase of what I've always imagined, with horror, my life would be like if I had ever had the misfortune to become one. The mother, whose son is two years old and whose husband is constantly away on business trips, is trapped pacing in the smallest possible space which she must share 24/7/365 with a tiny tyrant wearing her out with his demands, his anxieties, and his complete innocence and ignorance of all the terrible accidents waiting to befall him. Even when she leaves the house, he is with her; strangers focus on his adorability and regard her as his adjunct at best; the only people remotely interested in what she might have to say are other mommies, but only if she says something mommy-related. And she is constantly, surreally exhausted.

Until all of this starts happening to her, the teeth, the hair, the oh my goodness is that a tail growing at the base of her spine? Supernumary nipples? What?????

And by the way, yes, I totally think this book is in dialogue with Ira Levin's 1970s suburban horror classic, The Stepford Wives; both books are, after all, portraits of how a woman's transformation into a technology for keeping a man's house and raising his child** can make her feel like she is losing, or has lost, her humanity.

I would submit that as an explanation for the book's first half, anyway.

As for its second... the best I can come up with, and I do mean best, is that Rachel Yoder turned a feminist lament into a healthy, inspiring and daring feminist inversion of Chuck Pahlaniuk's Fight Club. And truly it is an inversion of that famous/infamous novel (and I'm already looking forward to treating myself to a double feature of the David Fincher film adaptation with Marielle Heller's of Nightbitch); we are completely privy to its strange protagonist's secrets and back-story, but unlike Tyler Durden and his Project Mayhem Space Monkeys, Nightbitch (the name the mother comes up for herself once she stops fighting and learns to love her fate) embraces its world and celebrates its weirdness and makes of it a positive thing, for isn't Nightbitch's experience -- motherhood and child-rearing -- in some fashion the most human story there is? Except maybe in the details?

She tipped her head back and filled the sky with a howl as big as her entire life, and, with that, was hell-bent on getting home, weeping now as her adrenaline surged and her muscles overflowed with blood and she crashed through the night.

A less brave author might have chosen to compound the horror by furnishing the mother with a typical suburban husband, happily benefiting from her dehumanization even if he's not consciously collaborating in it, insisting she "get help" when she begins embracing her strange transformation and starts looking to involve others in her discoveries. Yoder has dared to make of the mother's husband something much more interesting than merely the villain of an expected feminist parable, just as she keeps the mother/Nightbitch courageously and freely exploring what this all might mean and how far it's supposed to go. Then, too, the next logical villain would be the apparent frenemy figure of Jen the Big Blonde, a woman the mother knows from various kid-focused events at the library and the playground: the Big Blonde, after all, is never less than perfectly groomed and organized, always ready with toxic positivity and platitudes, making raising twin toddler girls look effortless and blissful, but again, Yoder isn't interested in making a villain of anybody but the incohate but near omnipotent forces of society that get women to connive in their own belittlement, that installs in most of us at a very young age a fierce internal critic that not only says we'll never be good enough but that we have no right to complain about anything or to feel badly about circumstances or to want to improve them, that it's wrong to ask for assistance when things get overwhelming. That it would be totally out of line for the mother to ask her husband to take on some more active parenting duties when he's actually home on weekends like putting their little boy to bed to give the mother a break from the nightly ordeal; that the perfect Big Blonde is anything but competition.

I still think motherhood would never have been the right choice for me, for so many reasons, but I've always at least intellectually understood why so many think I'm nuts for feeling this way. I've had many a discussion with my own mother, whose career as a pioneering female journalist at a time when that was still a bizarre novelty (she was actually the managing editor of a newspaper a little bit before Katherine Graham was, but it was a little podunk paper in a city barely worthy of the name in Wyoming, not the Washington Post) never got completely shelved but went into slow motion and stayed small when she and my dad started a family. To me it's always looked like she gave up all her dreams for the dubious pleasure of having me (though she did luck out with child #2, who is a genuine superstar), but she's always insisted she has no regrets and it was all worth it and like Nightbitch after her proclaims there is no greater love. I'll never know it, but I got a terrific vicarious experience of it from this novel and for that Rachel Yoder is to be celebrated for ever.

*The episode in question was devoted to a discussion of Virginie Despentes Vernon Subutex trilogy, a discussion to which Your Humble Blogger contributed in another episode.

**And yes, I've borrowed this insight from Sarah "You're Wrong About" Marshall, who shared it in an episode of her podcast devoted to the Levin novel and its film adaptations, which she viewed through two lenses: one of the popularity of Miltown and later tranquilizers, and of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother, which I own but still haven't read because it only exists as my reading nemesis, a trade paperback. But I think I'm finally going to have to read it soon now that I've got Nightbitch under my belt.

Ondjaki's TRANSPARENT CITY (Tr Stephen Henighan)

Admit it: you've been waiting your entire long, lonely, colorless life to read a novel that contains a line of dialogue as brilliantly bizarre-yet-perfectly-contextual as "these are difficult times for sorcerer roosters."

Satisfaction is just a few clicks away. Hurry up and get yourself some format of Angolan novelist Ondjaki's incredible Transparent City, which I caught myself explaining to my mom as "Ulysses with less stream-of-consciousness and more characters but also imagine if they discovered oil under the slums of Dublin and the Chinese were the economic powerhouse of the day."*

The "sorcerer rooster," by the way, is largely unremarkable except it recently lost an eye when, preparing to do his job and start the day with a mighty crow, he was instead struck in the eye by a stone shot from a great height by a young man in the multistorey apartment building next door -- which building is almost a character in itself, as is an albino cockroach that keeps appearing and stealing scenes -- one morning in 21st century Angola. 

The rooster is no more a sorcerer than any other urban bird; he is just referred to as one by a pair of suspicious tax inspectors struggling to make sense of the aforementioned building and its inhabitants, which, get ready for the inhabitants, most of whom sport incredible names like Ciente-the-Grand and Strong Maria and Little Daddy and João Slowly. And our sort-of protagonist, Odonato, which is very close to the insect order Odonata (which includes dragonflies and damselflies and is evolutionarily quite ancient even for insects), derived from the Greek word for "tooth, " and someday is really like to have a look at the original Portuguese text of this novel to see if all the character-names-as- English-words are original to that text or translated from the Portuguese words, and if so why Stephen Henighan left Odonato** alone instead of calling him "Dragonfly" or "Tooth." But that's a project for long winter months instead of brief summer ones.

Odonato is the father of Ciente-the-Grand, and has already begun (but barely) to become the literally transparent man he will be by novel's end when his wayward son gets himself shot in the ass and wanted by the authorities, which sets in motion the incredible mutual aid showcase that is the building most of these characters call home. They have worked out elaborate warning systems to alert one another of any government or other unwanted attention they're getting, have worked out schedules for exploiting the weird pools of water that collect in the first floor hallway (possibly due to deferred maintenance on the city's water systems, but maybe also a feature the building's residents created for themselves. Or both. I'm inclined to say both)***, and are in general very much entangled in one another's lives to a degree we mostly associate with extended families and I had to keep reminding myself that for most of human history this was the default setting for humanity -- mutuality and cooperation whenever possible, competition only when absolutely necessary -- while I caught myself regarding these relationships that pretty much amount to found family, with wistful awe.

As you see from these international book covers, the city is only part of the title in the English language editions, and is thus singular. For once, though, I think I like the English/ American title better; the plural in the romance languages (including the original Portuguese) would more directly translate as something like "The Transparents" as in, perhaps, the transparent people, but making it a singular/collective noun phrase and extending it as a description of the city of Luanda entire, it draws our focus to how most of the many foreign visitors drawn into the story of Odonato's building and its inhabitants must view the city: the petroleum engineers and other consultants brought in by the government to complete plans to exploit the oil that's been discovered literally under the city, for instance, seem to look right through its buildings, its infrastructure, its people (and of course a lot of the oil is under the Angolan equivalent of the famous Brazilian favelas). Even its local officials seem to have shifted to this perspective; those who aren't busy entertaining visiting American geologists are working to capitalize on another, more fleeting and ephemeral natural resource their country has to offer in the form of a coming solar eclipse, which will be total in Angola. As a Wyoming girl, still living in a place that is functionally also a resource colony with delusions of sovereignty that also, just a few years ago, cashed in on eclipse mania, I felt a kinship with the characters in The Transparent City and their ambivalence about the coming opportunities (a homeowner in Wyoming's capital city for many years, and a former journalist who covered the mineral extraction industries, I was always extra wary after learning that I did not own the mineral rights to my own property and that this is standard out here. Meaning of course that if oil, natural gas, etc were ever discovered in my neighborhood there would be swift eminent domain action and I would have to just hope that I'd be offered something reasonable in exchange. These characters, though, in Odonato's building... are they renting tenants? Co-operative owners? Squatters? It's never addressed.).

Ultimately this, like so many good literary novels, is a story of relationships, not so much between family members for all of the Odonato/Ciente plot as between friends, neighbors who have become friends, and yes, a few romantic relationships, such as the long marriages between Odonato and Xilisbaba and between their neighbors Edu (who has a formidable and world famous hernia swelling right next to a testicle that he carries around a little stool to support whenever he gets to sit down) and Nga Nelucha, between the entrepreneurial Joao Slowly and the actually hard-working Strong Maria, and the supportive appreciation the entire building extends toward a character known only as The Mailman, whose only wish in life is to be issued a moped with which to make his rounds delivering the city's mail but who can't even get home anymore because a huge and sprawling unauthorized garbage dump now blocks all access to his house so he sleeps... we don't know where he sleeps. Too, the figure known as Little Daddy, who was separated from his mother in the most recent interlude of  Angola's civil war and who is hoping that an upcoming TV appareance will help reunite them. Little Daddy just sort of crashes at the apartment building and maintains goodwill with its official residence and sort of earns his keep by doing any and all odd jobs that need doing, is a lens though which we see a huge variety of tendernesses and neighborly acts of good old fashioned kindness. It's all rather deftly sketched through us in Ondjaki/Henighan's understated style but we get to know everybody well enough to know them as distinct characters and to weep along with them and their friends when a few meet ignominious fates.

About that style, though: if you're not used to, say, Portuguese literary fiction and yes I'm mostly thinking of Jose Saramago here (and hey, this book was awarded the Jose Saramago Prize!), it might take you a while to get used to this text, in which there are phrases and phrases that feel like they could be sentences in that they contain subjects and predicates but are neither capitalized at the beginning nor punctuated at the end with periods, to say nothing of spoken dialogue, which mostly just appears amidst narrative lines, set apart at best with an em-dash. It's not at all good English literary prose like we're taught to respect and to try to produce in school, but its effective and evokes the way real conversations happen and real thoughts occur and real events unfold without resorting to the stream of consciousness text that makes, say, Ulysses so challenging for so many.

I have a lot of candidates for "my very best read of 2023" already as I've no doubt shown in this blog, but were I to explicitly list them all, Transparent City would be one of them, and were I to make a short list it would probably be on that as well, though the year is not yet half-over. The next time you want to feel something from a read, you could do a hell of a lot worse than get your mitts on this, or, I suspect, anything else of Ondjaki's. I'll be looking for more of his work sometime soon.

*This is not to disparage Ulysses,  especially not so close to Bloomsday, which I always devote to enjoying that book on audio, but a) Ulysses is on my mind because it is almost Bloomsday and b) I've had more than one person tell me, in my lifetime, that they like the grand tour of Dublin life James Joyce shared with the world but would prefer it without all the interiority and linguistic pyrotechnics. To which a legit reply might be, "then don't read Joyce, read, say, Edward Rutherford instead" but whatever. You do you. 

**Though I can certainly see why Odonato's wife, Xilisbaba, is left alone in this regard. What even is that name, though an exceptional name it is to be sure! I thought, of course, of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba upon first encountering this name but that's as close as I could get on this one. 

***At first this just sounds like an unfortunate puddle from leaking plumbing that has been neglected and allowed to accumulate a bit but this actually turns out to be at least deep enough to soak in like a hot springs and several scenes take place here with residents of the building and their guests soaking and socializing and affirming belief in the healing or restorative powers of the building's waters. And then the tax inspectors behold it and...