Book Review

GIRL

by David Thomas

reviewed by Emily Alford

This is a review of a current mainstream novel that was published in Britain to considerable acclaim but that is not available in the U.S. Anybody in the community who is not British and who visits the U.K. ought to look for it in bookstores like Waterstone's and Blackwell's. It's well worth the read. The subject is obvious, but it has no overtones of the specialist-community market. It's the sort of book that one could readily be seen reading on a long-haul flight.

It is no news that transgender is a hot subject. At first glance, the English writer David Thomas is an unlikely author to enter current discussion. His previous book NOT GUILTY is an extended defense of men against the charges that feminism has brought. Yet in GIRL he switches positions completely. Writing in the comic mode, drawing on the pulp genre of sex-and-shopping novels, and making wickedly funny use of contemporary British culture, he gives us a victim of accidental SRS, and turns her into a heroine of power and conviction.

The accident happens because of a gurney mix-up in an overworked National Health Service hospital. The novel begins as an unexpectedly new woman emerges from anesthesia. The deed done, the former Bradley has no choice (other than suicide, which she attempts) but to accept it and become Jackie.

Thomas has done his homework on gender change and SRS. He takes us through the sociological distancing and reintegration that Anne Bolin wrote about in IN SEARCH OF EVE. He describes classes in feminine deportment. Jackie is a most unusual transsexual, because s/he never intended it. In this sense, Thomas draws on a common device in what passes (pun intended) for CD/TS literature, the boy who is forced to cross over. Jackie has had no real life test, no learning to pass, no coming to terms with a reality that can be avoided but that cannot be denied. There is just the sudden fact that Bradley is a man no more.

Kate Bornstein writes that being forced to cross is a part of "the erotica of my people," and Jackie represents the ultimate instance. Thomas deals brilliantly with contemporary British hospital culture, in which the switch of patients is at least plausible. He is splendid as well with the British tabloid press, for which nastiness and exploitation are ways of life.

The novel's extended argument deals with two issues. One is Jackie's awakening to how awful men can be. She suffers a real ordeal at the hands of football (soccer) fans whose favorite chant to a pretty woman is "get your tits out for the lads." Thomas makes her tall, blonde, and well-shaped (of course) and she learns what it's like to be taken for a bimbo as well as a sex object.

Jackie also learns the codes that women use to deal with men. Not surprisingly (to anyone who is transgendered), she decides that she likes what she has become, and that given the choice she would not go back. But peace requires more than self-acceptance. Thomas builds the novel to a powerful demonstration of what a British transsexual has to endure from a society that recognizes her as female only by courtesy. Jackie arrives as the place where transgender people want to be, accepted both by herself and by the people who count in her life. But it does not come easy.

The novel falters only when it turns to the sex and shopping theme. So swift and so entire is Jackie's transformation that she virtually leaps from being a standard-model British yob with no future to being a highly paid and svelte inhabitant of the world of high fashion. In this sense she enters a crossdresser's dream, into a world of clothes that would cost most people a month's pay, scents to match, and dinners in the most expensive London restaurants. But since the circumstances of her transformation are highly unlikely anyway, we might as well relax and let the outcome be improbable too.

GIRL is not the first time that a male writer has taken on the theme of forced feminization. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, and a long list of others that reaches back to Homer have done it too. As the feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note (in SEXCHANGES), male writers have treated the theme as a matter of profound derangement. Female writers like Virginia Woolf (in ORLANDO) have seen the same matter differently, making it an interesting possibility rather than a sign of a world gone wrong.

The key to understanding GIRL is that what happens to Jackie is not derangement at all, at least in the end. The significance of the book is that a man has written it. In this sense it fits with TOOTSIE, TO WONG FOO, and even PRISCILLA as a pop-culture instance of the way that gender has become a complex question in our time.

[Ed. Note: GIRL can be ordered online from Blackwell's bookstore. at http://www.blackwell.co.uk/bookshops/ . No other online bookstore seems to carry it. -- JoAnn Roberts]


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