In the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s narrator, Barbara Rosenberg. She is trapped in her cramped 14th-floor apartment on East 69th Street and Second Avenue — “an address in which, as everybody knows, there is no honor” — the same “shrunken little apartment every Striver-Jew . . . moved to by the 1960s,” where she has lived her entire adult life. She is dying of cancer, addicted to opiates, and her mensch husband, Stephen, is dead. The empty twin bed in her daughter’s bedroom resembles a coffin — “quiet as a turd, lewd and horrible” — and something from another world is stalking her inside her home. This thing has feathers, wings, a hawk-like beak. It talks dirty to multiple women on the phone in the other room. And it calls her “Mom.” To Barbara, this is “this other you” — a monstrous avian version of her estranged child that has returned to care for her at the end of her life.
Was it Saul Bellow who once said, about Jewish humor, that “oppressed people tend to be witty”? Well, here we find Barbara Rosenberg quite oppressed indeed. One of the most impressive things about Night Night Fawn is that Barbara’s more than 300-page comic rant cannot be separated from the oppressive worldview that has turned her so lonely. Yes, Barbara is hilarious — but she is also transphobic, and, by her own admission, “an ordinary fascist.” But the author Rosenberg, who based this novel on his personal experience caring for his estranged mother while she was dying of cancer, refuses the comforting distance of satire, instead trapping us inside her consciousness where jokes and cruelty coexist and are, perhaps, inseparable.
Barbara’s voice belongs to a distinct postwar Jewish comic tradition — the rant — the most obvious reference being Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Night Night Fawn, much like Portnoy’s Complaint, reads as one long oral autobiography. Plot-wise, it is about Barbara, at the end of her life, revisiting every slight, snub, and fantasy of youth to try and locate when exactly things went so wrong for her.
While Portnoy’s anxieties are psychosexual, Barbara’s are social. Nearly all of them could be categorized into the bucket of “class anxiety” — she is obsessed with the distance between where she began and where she thought she’d end up. Like Portnoy, Barbara’s mode of comic relief is inseparable from this distance, and is no doubt shaped by it. I will call this bridge-and-tunnel humor, the humor created in the distance between the outskirts and the center, and I’d argue that bridge-and-tunnel humor is what we think of when we think of East Coast humor. Both Portnoy and Barbara are bridge-and-tunnel Jews: Portnoy grows up across the Hudson in Newark, and Barbara across the East River in Queens. Both their lives are oriented toward the center of gravity that is Manhattan, and their grievances and indignities, which they joke about, may all be traced back to the desire to belong to an imagined center stratum.
Even if Barbara, with all her jokes, is the joke, Rosenberg also bestows her with the gift of storytelling and a rich inner life. Her comic register is the familiar voice of a Jewish yenta, a voice that will feel familiar, even comforting, to those of us who grew up in the New York vicinity. It’s the voice of Joan Rivers, say, or Fran Drescher. By embodying his mother’s voice, Rosenberg reveals how judgment and exclusion can lurk beneath Barbara’s familiar comic register. The more time we spend locked inside Barbara’s particularly postwar, class-anxious Jewish American psyche, the clearer we see how oppressive views — like transphobia and Zionism, to name the two of Barbara’s biggest trespasses — might weave themselves into someone’s sense of self and their abiding value systems.
We learn that Barbara has spent her entire life striving and aspiring. From a teenage dream of Hollywood fame she turns toward more “attainable” desires, like a respectable uptown address and an authentic mink stole, like the one her glamorous high school friend Sugar Becker wears. (Sugar is Barbara’s foil and only female friend, who did in fact make it in Hollywood.) Stephen, a medical student and the brother of Barbara’s co-worker in the Garment District, appears to offer her a path toward the status bump she’s always dreamed of.
Rosenberg brilliantly reveals the connection between Barbara’s politics and sense of self in the novel’s retelling of her and Stephen’s first date, in which they see the 1960 blockbuster Exodus — they’re late to the party, it’s 1964, and this is a re-release — at the Kings Theatre in Flatbush. Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger, was America’s Hollywood introduction to the State of Israel, starring hottie Paul Newman and his “wet, moonlit physique” as Zionist paramilitary leader Ari Ben Canaan. The film, barely concealed as propaganda, embeds the founding of Israel into a sweeping Hollywood love story: plot-wise, it’s about the struggle to establish a Jewish homeland, but it’s also about Kitty Fremont, a WASP American nurse played by Eva Marie Saint, falling in love with Newman and, simultaneously, coming to sympathize with the Zionist cause. Hilariously, as Exodus screens, Barbara is giving Stephen a very long and involved hand job. Before the film finishes — and after Stephen does — he asks Barbara if she wants to get married. Seeing this as a ticket out of her working-class life, she says yes, but the excitement is short-lived because, after the movie, Stephen confesses he no longer wants to be a doctor after all — he wants to work in public health. Barbara is whiplashed. She has just agreed to marry one version of Stephen, the one who’d propel her to the real-fur lifestyle, only to discover she’s unwittingly signed up for a life far less glamorous. Surely, she’d never have given a hand job to a man who planned to become a public servant! Two things happen to Barbara in that theater, in the glow of the Hollywood lights: her fate is sealed, and so is her belief in the State of Israel.
Barbara is not some cartoon fascist: she’s an ordinary postwar American woman who derives her understanding of the world and her place in it from mass media and entertainment. Exodus transforms the controversial State of Israel, and the expulsion of thousands of Arabs, into Hollywood romance, and Barbara consumes it the way she consumes every other American fantasy. She is far less concerned with Jewish nationalism than she is with celebrity, sex appeal, and romanticized transcendence: in fact, she relates to Kitty’s character more than any of the Jewish characters, because Kitty is the one on the outside, seduced by the Zionist cause.
“Well, it is kind of a sexy movie . . . once you get past the Holocaust part,” Barbara tells her successful longtime frenemy Sugar, when she calls to break the news of her engagement. Despite having no personal connection to Israel, Exodus still makes her feel:
. . . part of something much larger than myself—but also something that was entirely about me. Something that had unrolled a carpet from ancient times to arrive at my feet in the present. And I wanted that something. Wanted it to the exclusion of any other consideration.
By pinning Barbara’s “political awakening” between a hand job, a marriage proposal, and a 10-foot-tall, shirtless Paul Newman, Rosenberg shows how someone like Barbara could embrace dangerous ideology — not through political conviction, but because fascist ideas are just the wall color, the background to the fantasy. Barbara even admits that if someone had asked her about “the Arabs who already lived there,” she’d have responded with a classic Hollywood line: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” “The bird has told me my whole life I’m a bigot,” she continues, “and for all I know it’ll put it on my headstone: Barbara Rosenberg, An Ordinary Fascist.”
When Barbara becomes pregnant a few years later, she expresses a desire to name her daughter Kitty, after the film’s glamorous gentile heroine, but Stephen refuses. If they’re going to borrow a name from Exodus, he insists, it should be Jordana, after Ari Ben Canaan’s sister and the subject of the film’s B-plot romance, because Jordana is “at least a Jewish name, and the namesake of a soldier.” As she does with every choice she’s ever made, Barbara wonders whether this is where she went wrong raising a daughter who has decided to become a trans man: perhaps if she’d named her after the beautiful leading goy, none of this would have happened.
It’s a funny contradiction. Barbara has just watched what she herself recognizes as effective propaganda, yet the character she hopes her daughter takes after isn’t Jordana, the “heroic” Jewish freedom fighter, but the glamorous gentile whose primary role is that of the love interest. When imagining her future daughter, she imagines some romantic ideal: a girl whom Paul Newman would fall in love with, not someone who becomes part of history. Exodus makes Barbara believe history is waiting for her — through her child — and through stories she needs to believe about herself.
Since Stephen left his ambitions of doctorhood for public health, Jordana becomes Barbara’s final chance to reach a social status she never could otherwise. To ensure this, she insists they raise her in Manhattan — not in Queens, or even the suburbs, where Stephen grew up — and finagles her into the Spence School for Girls, a school where her daughter’s roll call “was like being in a film; the latest Vanderbilt child, so-and-so del Drago, Eloise of Denmark. . . .”
In the novel, “the bird,” as Barbara calls her adult child — birth name Jordana — is a trans Marxist intellectual, as is Jordy, the author. Rosenberg has been open about the fact that this novel began as a memoir. In a 2014 essay titled “Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day,” Rosenberg writes about the experience of caring for his dying mother in the small Upper East Side apartment where he grew up, six months after his father died unexpectedly, following years of estrangement from them after coming out as lesbian. In this essay, written 12 years before Night Night Fawn’s publication, he writes:
Soon I had decided the whole project of coming out had been bankrupt — that I had been misled by identity politics into a contraction of the political field to the micro universe of the bourgeois family. The whole thing had been so petit bourgeois (I thought to myself, petit bourgeoisely) — an embarrassing political miscalculation.
Rosenberg’s mother’s rejection of his identity affected him deeply, of course. Barbara is not horrible to “the bird” just because she rejects who he has become. She is bitter because the entire world as she knew it has essentially eroded beneath her, and her value system cannot keep up with the times.
And what’s funnier than watching someone stuck in the past flail in the present day? Barbara spends many pages shvitzing over an old corduroy blazer of Stephen’s that 11-year-old Jordana is obsessed with wearing. While mom and daughter argue over whether or not she should be allowed to see the movie Flashdance — which Barbara admits isn’t “technically a lesbian film, but who are we kidding” — Barbara tries to hide the blazer deep in Stephen’s coat closet, as if by getting rid of the blazer Jordana wants to wear so badly, she can wipe Jordana’s gender expression away. Obviously, Jordana locates it quickly — what preteen wouldn’t? — and when Barbara discovers her daughter “modeling the sport coat in the full-length mirror” like a “golem of upside-down gender,” she bemoans, “I cannot communicate the level of despair this scene inspired in me.” What makes the scene both funny and cruel is that Barbara is not immune to the fantasy of clothing either. She herself is dressed in a “black DKNY belted blazer dress,” an admittedly very bridge-and-tunnel garment — expensive-ish, probably bought discounted at Loehmann’s or Daffy’s. We see Barbara relishing in her own gender expression as she gets dressed and does her make-up while depriving Jordana of the same enjoyment. Barbara’s panic over the blazer and Flashdance — two disconnected symbols that someone else might see as innocuous preteen obsessions of the week — is connected to her total loss of control over who her daughter is becoming.
I would categorize The Sopranos, the funniest drama ever made, as another exceptional example of bridge-and-tunnel humor. I have wondered if, at its core, The Sopranos is not just the story of a man who didn’t go to college figuring out how to raise kids who do. The characters of Barbara Rosenberg and Tony Soprano are both larger-than-life figures whose fatal flaws lie in their limited, antiquated ideas about gender roles and America. While Barbara reluctantly settles on giving her child a name that implies cultural continuity, Tony and Carmela chose to name their daughter Meadow, which could not possibly sound less Italian. (David Chase confirmed Meadow’s name was not a reference to the nearby Meadowlands, as many fans suspected — just a way of articulating their assimilation.) It’s both joke and tragedy that the Rosenbergs and the Sopranos provided their children with access to a more educated, elite world, only for that world to render their children incomprehensible to them, and impossible to reach.
In “Eloise,” one of the show’s most iconic episodes, Tony and Carmela drive into the city for dinner with Meadow and her roommates from Columbia. Her boyfriend Finn regularly skis in the Laurentians; her friend Alex is descended from Spanish royalty. After her brother A.J. casually mentions a paper he wrote on Billy Budd, saying, “My teacher says it’s a gay book,” Carmela tells him that’s ridiculous. But Meadow confidently backs him up, citing a literary critic at Columbia who has written extensively about this for years. Carmela gets worked up, dismissing this point of view as new-age propaganda by a new generation that insists “everything’s gay.” Tony, the patriarch, chews quietly during the argument, absorbing the reality that by achieving the American Dream for his family, he seems to have been cast out of its next chapter.
Night Night Fawn recognizes the road to achieving your dreams is often the straight and narrow one, but it also offers hope in the knowledge that the center no longer holds or exists in the way it once did: the values that once promised “arrival” and “success” are the very ones that failed Barbara and estranged her from her child. In the final pages of the novel, when the bird spreads its wings and flies free from the cramped apartment, just as Barbara passes on to the afterlife, the nonstop wisecracking abruptly ends — and in the silence the reader feels the bird’s freedom as pure and unburdened, attached to none of Barbara’s sarcasm or irony. It left me wondering with amazement what humor even is once it stops policing who does and doesn’t belong.
Christina Drill is a writer from New Jersey based in Brooklyn. Her fiction has been published by Boston Review, Washington Square Review, The Florida Review, among other places, and her non-fiction has been published in NYMag and The Kenyon Review. She writes the Substack Annoying Blondes.