[LittlePuss Press; 2024]
“What was Ashton’s plan for the Democratic primary for the 2018 US House elections?” This thought pings like a notification through Ashton’s mind as he gives his date head. In Anton Solomonik’s short story “How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing,” Ashton tries to cure his loneliness by running for Congress in New York’s 12th district. This character’s primary, and really only, means of gathering constituent support are sexual. Mid-fellatio political scheming is par for the course. With sex as networking, Ashton warps queer sex’s function as a form of community-making into something almost straight in its naked political ambition. After all, Ashton is only fucking his date so that he can get in with his date’s partner, a developer who maintains the servers for a progressive political party.
In 2022, ahead of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s reprint of her debut cult classic Nevada, novelist Imogen Binnie commented: “Trans people are very often very funny.” Solomonik’s debut short story collection, Realistic Fiction, out from LittlePuss Press, proves Binnie right. His characters, lonely and ambitious trans men, and wayward young girls and women, struggle to relate to others to heartbreaking and comical ends. Realistic Fiction offers a playful interrogation of genre and storytelling, and provides knowing insight into the trap of normative gender.
The world of trans publishing is tight-knit: Binnie’s Nevada was originally published in 2013 by LittlePuss Press’s precursor, Topside Press (2011-2017). Topside also published Casey Plett’s first book, the Lambda Literary Award-winning short story collection A Safe Girl to Love (2014). Plett, along with the writer Cat Fitzgerald, worked together on a sci-fi and fantasy anthology for Topside, which then became LittlePuss’s first publication when the two launched the press in 2021. Now helmed by Plett, Fitzgerald, and Emily Zhou, whose excellent first book was published by the press in 2023, LittlePuss is a powerhouse reigniting the “trans lit” renaissance of the early 2010s that Nevada helped spur. Solomonik’s essential contribution to this robust and growing tradition lies in his humorous skewering of trans masculine loneliness and privilege. Solomonik himself is part of trans lit’s infrastructure in New York, co-hosting the monthly open mic called the World Transsexual Forum with Jeanne Thornton.
The stories in Realistic Fiction are alienating, funny, and full of vivid and riotous juxtapositions. As the character Wolfscum in “Moving to Boron” puts it, the collection’s characters speak “as if reenacting the stylized dialogue of fictional characters.” A knowing self-awareness pervades. The story “Realistic Fiction,” which opens the collection, begins with the assertion: “I always hated ‘realistic’ fiction.” By this, the story’s narrator, a trans man, means the “slice-of-life-type writing in which it’s just people’s feelings and observations and no one does anything, there’s no plot, no conflict.” His father’s preferred genres of police and spy novels stand in contrast to all this messy, boring realism. The father and son’s fatal mistake, of course, lies in the assumption that the masculinity these novels portray directly represents reality rather than a fantasy of masculine domination. By placing this story at the collection’s beginning, Solomonik asks the reader to consider the genre of the writing that follows it: Is Realistic Fiction, in fact, realistic?
The opener “Realistic Fiction” details a son’s relationship to his father alongside his clumsy exploration of sexuality. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” Magic the Gathering forms the tense connective tissue between two childhood friends as they grow up. Many of Solomonik’s characters obsess over European philosophers and a space opera anime based on Alexander the Great’s military exploits. In “Porn,” a young woman who loves Rousseau tries (and the operative word here is tries) to sell pages torn out of a porno mag to school children after spending all of her money on burritos while stoned the night before. “Signs” features a similarly dejected, and Willa Cather-obsessed eighth-grader who is offered perhaps the strangest way to not fail her English class: Incorporate the insights of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin into an essay on Death Comes for the Archbishop. Easy. The cringe perils of winging an open mic form the core of “The Hot Tub Story,” while two college students devoted to Ayn Rand go on an ill-fated date in “Meeting of the Minds.” Like in “Moving to Boron,” this story ends with the sudden termination of a potential sexual or romantic connection.
Family plays a crucial role in Solomonik’s take on the trans return home narrative in “The Meaningful Ex.” In the trans return home narrative, which in its least compelling applications might also be called a trope, the plot is structured around a return to the protagonist’s place of origin. Most often, they are there to attend a funeral or deal with a family crisis. The rest is feelings and observations, as the protagonist comes to terms with family and childhood friends’ attempts to reconcile their previous notions of the protagonist’s gender with reality. Though the gay return home narrative is its most obvious precursor, the trans permutation is doubly troubled. Medical transition in particular muddies recognition, as in Robert Altman’s classic film Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), or Andrea Pallaoro’s Monica (2022), which features a career-defining performance from Trace Lysette. Regardless, there are the usual points of pain: dead-naming, misgendering, or greater forms of violence. There is, as always, the immovable force of each family’s specific fucked-up-ness, all transphobia aside. Solomonik disrupts the narrative’s melancholy, seeming fixation on trans pain, and the privileging of the cis gaze with his signature sense of humor. This is not to say that the protagonist of “The Meaningful Ex,” Origen, wholly escapes these harms. Rather, Solomonik pulls focus on, for example, how Origen makes his partner make him eat dog food as part of a degradation kink. This act of submission changes and redeems Origen, and works to repair familial and historical humiliations. Nor does the narrative cast Origen as a victim. In fact, Solomonik subjects the reader and the characters that populate the story to Origen’s numerous quirks and insecurities, as, for example, when he loudly and unbidden live translates a eulogy at his grandfather’s funeral. Literature, it seems, has a leg up on film; Solomonik joins a deep bench of authors (Plett, Zhou, Torrey Peters, Hazel Jane Plante, Emerson Whitney, Harry Dodge, Joshua Whitehead) playing with and de-cis-sifying the trans return home narrative.
Tonally and in terms of subject material, Realistic Fiction recalls Jackie Ess’s novel on cuckoldry, Darryl (2021). There’s plenty of sex to be found, but the sex rarely feels sexy. Solomonik’s characters approach sex as if they are sitting in the backseat of their bodies, unable or perhaps unwilling to reach the steering wheel. The telling exception to this is “August, 1962,” a story in which a time-traveling Samuel Beckett (no relation) takes the form of a female intern to “save the people of twentieth-century America” by sucking and fucking the one and only John F. Kennedy and, at the president’s request, his aide. Though Sam appears as a young woman to the President, the story’s narrator refers to Sam with masculine pronouns. Solomonik has therefore written a story about gay sex which relies on the thinnest science fictional pretexts and which stars a scion of 20th century American masculinity. It’s possible, too, that Sam—as a young woman, as an intern—is an egg waiting to be cracked, and that the narrator is privy to knowledge not yet available to her. Regardless, it is clear that Sam finds sex, and in particular submitting to JFK, pleasurable. Yet the story insists that the sex acts he partakes in are just as much about history as they are erotic: “His will and his body—like those of Kennedy—were not his own, but belonged to something greater than himself—to God, to History…”
In Realistic Fiction, sex is realistically commonplace, and like any other interaction, sometimes disappointing and underwhelming. It is also a particularly vulnerable terrain in which characters encounter the ways in which various supremacies thwart their pursuit of human connection. Solomonik’s writing lays bare the strangeness of sex, like an uncomfortable and distinctly un-twee version of Nathan W. Pyle’s comic Strange Planet. Genitals, as the character Ashton notes, are often “just as upsetting as anyone else’s genitals, if not more.” Even while having objectively hot T4T sex in a public bathroom (which includes consent asked for at every step, and which almost makes him come) in the story “Cassandra,” Ashton nonetheless compares sex to peeing in public: “An embarrassing yet all-too-possible physical act.”
Here again, Ashton’s approach to sex and gender—the only character to have two stories in the collection, “How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing” as well as “Cassandra”—is instructive. While hooking up with the developer’s boyfriend, he comes head-to-head with the emptiness of pursuing what he calls “real masculinity.” Despite doing “everything right” to emulate the ideal masculine aesthetic, including dieting, Ashton finds himself unable to “engage with other people, sexually or emotionally.” Perhaps he suffers from a fatal case of what the internet might call “main character syndrome,” as well as a hefty dose of internalized transphobia. Solomonik makes it clear that Ashton’s loneliness results from this pursuit: Ashton believes that “Real masculinity [comes] from being powerful and uncaring” and from having the “peace of mind that came from knowing you were the most important person in your own life.” See, too, how he relates to other trans men; Ashton wants to differentiate himself from other trans men, whose big boots and trucks and “cartoonish, butch gestures” preclude them from joining the club of the truly powerful—cis men. Ashton, as Solomonik lets slip later in the story, wears those very same big boots himself.
These stories lay bare the noxious effects of always being aware of how your body might be read by others, while always reading the signs of gender and desirability on another person’s body. Solomonik excels at skewering this compulsion to assess yourself and others. The consequences of this practice are clear in the quality of relationships between his characters. Combine trans hypervigilance with diet culture, and the result can make for a truly toxic sludge. In “Moving to Boron,” chemical toxicity is literalized by its protagonist’s idealization of a rural town where boron is mined. The protagonist, Wolfscum, moves there with his best friend, Punk Skunk, in search of what he calls “pure living.” He hopes the elements—the unforgiving Californian desert where Boron lies, the remnants of boron coating the landscape—along with difficult manual labor at the town’s open pit mine will cleanse and purify him. Wolfscum wants, more than anything else, to become “a hard man.” Much of the story’s humor comes from Wolfscum’s utter failure in his pursuit of this fantasy. Unable to find entry level work at the mine itself (accosting a miner in the employee parking lot does not get him a job), he can only find an unpaid volunteer position at the Borax Visiting Center under an exacting boss who has the very mastery over his environment that Wolfscum so badly craves for himself. In Boron, Wolfscum does not find easy, “honest employment,” just a job he hates. This, as the reader knows, can realistically be found anywhere.
Sam Karagulin is a reader, writer, and translator. He lives in New York with his cat Blue.
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