Finally got around to reading
Confessions of the Fox, by Jordy Rosenberg; it's only been out a few months, but the moment I heard about it I knew I needed to read it, and only the vicissitudes of grad school prevented me until now. I fully expected to love it; as it turns out, I'm not even sure I liked it.
The concept of the book is incredible: an academic, R. Voth, discovers a lost manuscript that retells the story of Jack Sheppard (legendary thief whose story is chronicled in John Gay's
Beggar's Opera and later as Mack the Knife in Brecht's
Threepenny Opera; he also shows up in Fielding's
Jonathan Wild and a multitude of other miscellaneous eighteenth-century writings), who is revealed to be a trans man. The novel itself consists of the text of this manuscript, along with Voth's footnotes, which slowly reveal a story of their own. Voth is also a trans man; Bess, Sheppard's companion and love interest, is revealed to be South Asian.
Everything about this seems calibrated to appeal to me: queer people in the eighteenth century, people of color in the eighteenth century, meta on academia and the archive
and truth and falsehood in historic narrative, metanarrative in general. I still maintain that it's a genius, extraordinarily ambitious, extremely laudable concept, but in the end--actually, by about ten pages in--the execution was too bafflingly shoddy for me to enjoy it.
According to the back-cover bio, Rosenberg is a professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so I can be assured that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to literature of the period. (Indeed, Voth's footnotes are peppered liberally with references to real academic works of history and theory, and there is a six or so page bibliography at the end of the novel, which I will admit might have been my favorite part of the whole book.) Which comes back to the baffling part of the whole thing, because the faux-eighteenth century manuscript part of the book just isn't very good, in a way that would suggest to me, sans background knowledge, that the author wasn't familiar with actual eighteenth-century writing. Capitalization for emphasis abounds, as does the -'d instead of -ed ending for the past tense (watch'd, paus'd, etc.), and Rosenberg makes liberal use of cant, which he then defines in the footnotes. (I would assume this is a Fielding reference, and it's an amusing one.) However, not only does he not utilize a lot of other great eighteenth-century text stylizations (phrenzy! connexion!), but the style of the prose itself is unconvincingly eighteenth-century, making the stylizations seem more like a gimmick than anything more. (Usually this would be a nitpick, but Rosenberg is clearly so interested in language throughout the novel, and bothered to use certain stylizations and obsessively footnote the slang terms, so this neglect of other stylizations as well as overall style seems odd--at some point you've got to go big or go home, because you've already lost the audience that's going to be bothered by it.)
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