The Brooklyn Rail

Maybe the best way to make sense of a wild hair is to locate its strange bedfellow. Confronted by Isabel Waidner’s latest novel, the surreal and splendid Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, I sought out their previous. This was Sterling Karat Gold, which in 2021 captured the UK’s Goldsmiths award for “fiction that breaks the mold;” American publication came last year. Sure enough, that book and the new one prove companion berserkers. Sentence for sentence, the reading’s swift but prickly, the narrator-protagonists booksmart but streetwise. Their stories belly right along, whipping up tension and sympathy for characters outside the norms, non-binary creatives who improvise a living, even as they carom from kitchen-sink realism to sci-fi fantasy.

In short, this author escorts us into an alternative universe, emphasis on alternative. A wormhole is a familiar science-fiction trope—we’ve all read A Wrinkle in Time—but in Waidner the portals are more than usually discombobulating, part threat and part salvation. More than that, when even non-normative characters steer by reference points we recognize, the urban blight or media blur of the twenty-first century megalopolis, their movements have some quality of the transgressive⎯emphasis on trans. Gender fluidity, its place in an unaccommodating world, is the challenge that provokes these prismatic texts. Their rippling colors illuminate queer love stories. A major, madcap storyline develops out of Corey Fah’s significant other Drew’s favorite hour of TV, a talk show about “irregularities in the spatio-temporal continuum,” i.e., wormholes. The show’s a hit, and yet its openly queer host has lately suffered a deepening depression, even lapsing into on-screen silence, and to see this prompts Corey’s most ringing peroration about LGBTQ+ struggles, put across with typical mordant humor:

People were quite content to believe in travel through time and space, but they fundamentally didn’t believe that a working-class homo, met with that level of success, could or should be surviving long-term…. Whether consciously or unconsciously, people preferred [the TV star] dead. Kept their received world order intact.

Such received notions get blown sky-high, in Corey Fah as in its predecessor. Nonetheless, each novel comes across with a different affect. The first is a fight for life, the primary antagonist a hanging judge. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, as the title suggests, traces an out-of-bounds pursuit of happiness. When the novel recalls classic science fiction, it’s sunny Kurt Vonnegut rather than tormented Philip K. Dick, and even the monsters have a cartoon quality. The most prominent case is Disney’s Bambi, frighteningly reconfigured. The movie’s adorable fawn has sprouted “four spider’s legs, grand total … eight,” and “multiple sets of eyes.” Waidner’s acknowledgements cite the inspiration of Nicole Eisenman, her 1993 pen-and-ink mashup, Bambi Gregor.

Funny they should mention Gregor Samsa. Franz Kafka serves as another landmark, in Waidner’s dreamscape. Sterling Karat Gold, as noted by critics like Matt Bell in the New York Times Book Review, enacts a mockery of justice with parallels to The Trial. As for Corey Fah, it sets me thinking of The Castle. Placenames like “Koszmar” and “Sociální” might turn up in Prague, and Corey dubs the nightmare fawn “Bambi Pavok,” adapting the Czech word for “spider” (a word Corey explicates). More importantly, the protagonist tumbles dizzily through this world and others in a quest for a better life. It’s social mobility ⎯ or a Kafkaesque simulacrum, never achieving true security.

Naturally, the castle has undergone an update. Rather than a medieval tower, it’s a glowing drone: high-tech certification that Corey Fah has won an award for “the Fictionalisation of Social Evils.” As a plot device, the award notification proves a multifarious delight. Sooner or later, it hovers over every major character, sometimes a cudgel and sometimes a whoopee cushion, often a bit of both. More than that, Corey Fah’s good news has special resonance for their creator. Not only has Waidner won the Goldsmiths, they’ve also made the shortlist for work concerned with “Social Evils,” such as the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Besides that, the author has launched their own engagé ventures, such as the London series Queers Read This. Thus, Fah’s lucky break, with its whimsical archaic spelling, points to matters beyond whimsy.

To collect the award, a writer has to link up with the drone electronically, “united in one livestreamed image.” To Fah, however, the whole “modus operandi was disassociation.” The hovering device seems some “UFO,” and there’s a far stranger presence: Bambi Pavok, rhymes with havoc. Where’d that come from? Could there be some sort of…. wormhole?

Taking the monster home to Drew, rather than a fat check and the itinerary for an “international book tour,” Corey sets off complications that reach far beyond the Prague-like present. Bambi’s home world bleeds into this one, in the form of a venison fast-food franchise with a conniving, antlered chief exec. The talk show and its tormented host transmogrify into a stadium event, now packed and now empty, and in one case putting a Kalashnikov to Corey’s head. It’s an eye-popping carnival that crackles with wit, and yet I’m reluctant to make the comparison to Rube Goldberg. There’s too much tragedy for that.

The final glimpse of the TV star may come via another wormhole, one carrying everyone back to the 1960s, but it’s an ugly episode of gay violence, a bloody scene left out of The Boys in the Band. So too, between the bumptious goings-on, there peek more and more details of Corey’s difficulties. As a teenager, unhappy and isolated, they wear clothes “from the charity shop.” Not much later:

Oh no⎯me in the public library. Lots of mes, ages twenty-five to thirty-five, studying hundreds of books…, self-educating like no one was watching, cos, matter of fact, no one was…. I was reading as if my life depended on it, and it did, it did.

In passages like this, late in the narrative, the fiction becomes a psychological study. It journeys not to Deep Space Nine but to a brave new world within. As Corey reconnects with their struggle to get anywhere, they understand more about where they’ve come to. This includes, of all things, how they failed to connect with the prize drone. The writer wasn’t raised with such comforts, such gadgets; even their best work enjoyed “scant financial or reputational award.” Thus, the story’s upbeat ending⎯heartening in ways you’d never expect, just right for a pair of novels disruptive in the best sense, a one-two punch like nothing in recent memory⎯allows our hero to multiply their good luck, sharing it with their community. Drew gets a taste, of course, but so does a former enemy. When Corey Fah does social mobility, they make room for all the rest of us.