On September 11th, 2001, Nell Rifkin finally got to talk to Fay Vasquez-Rabinowitz. That’s not the most important thing that happened in Manhattan that day, but for the two high school juniors, it’s a close second. Sitting next to each other for the first time in the Meetinghouse for the daily Worship, Nell giddily thinks, “My butt touched her butt. I mean, we were basically having sex.”
This is the debut novel from James Frankie Thomas, a native New Yorker and graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Published in September by Abrams, it has already developed a devoted following. Interviews and podcasts with the author reveal how his life parallels or deviates from that of his characters.
As a freshman, Nell transferred to the titular Idlewild, a private Quaker school in downtown New York City. Fay is a lifer, having started in kindergarten. It’s a storied, progressive institution where students can take classes like “Slavery, Capital, and Empire: Rethinking the American Experiment,” and call teachers by their first names. Every morning they sit through the Call to Worship, a traditional site of awkwardness and occasional rebellion, and spend long afternoons at diners and Starbuckses.
The two friends bond over shared queer obsessions, though those obsessions trend in markedly different directions. Fay has an all-consuming fixation on male homosexuality (or HoYay; “Homoeroticism: Yay!”), looking for it in every book they read for class, the school production of Othello (where a racist framing device begins a fascinating, all-too-realistic subplot), and the ambiguous relationship between two sophomore boys at school. “Two dudes doing it,” Fay confesses. “It’s like…my thing,” Though she had wondered if she was really a lesbian, and if so, why her “real sexuality existed elsewhere, somewhere so remote and well protected that it was inaccessible….” Nell, meanwhile, is, in fact, a lesbian with an all-consuming obsession with Fay (whom she regularly calls “boss,”) her fawning desire almost too much to read at moments.
At thirty-three, Nell avoids Fifteenth street between Second and Third, not wanting to share space with the school building. Fay, who basically flunked out and never made it to college, spins her wheels at dead-end jobs without any real friendships or relationships to speak of. Told through three distinct narrative styles–Fay and Nell as adults reflecting on their youth, alternating with chapters told through the voice of “the F&N unit,” a breathless “we”—readers learn immediately that something happened at Idlewild to drive Fay and Nell apart, something momentous enough to send them into a tailspin of unfulfilling adulthood. A few interstitial chapters take the form of a gay fanfiction (or RPS, “real person slash”). Fay and Nell start writing about their new classmate Theo Severyn, a sociopathic and beautiful sophomore who moved in with a subservient classmate, stored on a friends-locked LiveJournal that reveals each girls’ motivations.
The careful attention paid to the inner workings of both girls, immediately relatable to anyone who shared a love of slash fiction and an early 2000s burgeoning political consciousness, imbue every chapter with emotional immediacy.
The stakes in this novel are relatively low–will a rich girl get into college, will the best friends get the lead in the school musical, will two boys kiss? Yet, over the course of almost four hundred pages that move at a quick, insatiable clip, they feel unbearably high. The careful attention paid to the inner workings of both girls, immediately relatable to anyone who shared a love of slash fiction and an early 2000s burgeoning political consciousness, imbue every chapter with emotional immediacy. The unreliable narrators–everyone in the book, made clear through cracks and slippages where Fay and Nell remember events differently, while each believing fully in their recollections–leave you wondering what really happened, and whether it matters.
Thomas’s debut avoids slipping into the melodrama that often characterizes young adult fiction or the cool distance from melodrama that might signal an overserious literary attempt.
Despite being almost entirely about two girls’ senior year of high school, Thomas’s debut avoids slipping into the melodrama that often characterizes young adult fiction or the cool distance from melodrama that might signal an overserious literary attempt. Instead, his writing–punctuated with laugh-out-loud humor and deep grief–functions as a just-scrubbed window, looking frankly and mercilessly into the tortured yet hilarious fucked-upedness that can characterize queer young adulthood.
