In Night Night Fawn, Rosen­berg returns to the explo­ration of the unre­al and the plau­si­ble that char­ac­ter­ized his debut, Con­fes­sions of the Fox. The pro­tag­o­nist of Rosenberg’s new book shares his last name, and from the first page the lines between phys­i­cal and psy­chic real­i­ties are impos­si­ble to pin down. Bar­bara Rosen­berg is dying, and her long-estranged off­spring, J. (named in the jack­et copy as a trans son though referred to in Barbara’s nar­ra­tion as a daugh­ter — or even a mon­ster) has returned to care for her in her last days. 

Night Night Fawn is cen­tral­ly an explo­ration of per­for­mance. Bar­bara is a work­ing-class Jew­ish woman from Flat­bush whose most pas­sion­ate emo­tions seem to be direct­ed toward oth­er women. How­ev­er, she is con­strained to the point of tor­ment by her deter­mi­na­tion to per­form with­in the bounds of an upward­ly mobile, Anglo-Amer­i­can het­eropa­tri­archy. Of her late hus­band, Bar­bara remarks that she likes when he treats her like ​“a shik­sa bim­bo”: a self-iden­ti­fied yen­ta, she is tor­tured by the fact that she is not, and seems com­plete­ly unable to become, a blonde, afflu­ent, emp­ty-head­ed avatar of ide­al­ized fem­i­nin­i­ty (whether the blond and thought­less woman exists, and if she exists, whether she is hap­py, remains an open ques­tion). Barbara’s desire to meet an upper-mid­dle-class, WASPish ide­al is, in Rosenberg’s hands, a form of cis­gen­der drag, a heav­i­ly man­aged per­for­mance of what Bar­bara would insist is innate — her femininity. 

Her child’s refusal to even attempt the same trans­for­ma­tion per­plex­es and haunts her. Once you see past the veneer of nor­mal­i­ty and become aware that you are per­form­ing, it becomes impos­si­ble to return to the Edenic state of igno­rance. Bar­bara and J. have tak­en diver­gent paths, reunit­ed in Barbara’s hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry nar­ra­tion of her own life yet still inca­pable of tru­ly reach­ing one anoth­er. J., dead­named Jor­dana, brings the specter of the author into the room in a neat meta-nar­ra­tive trick that allows the read­er to tol­er­ate the big­otry of Barbara’s nar­ra­tion, secure in the knowl­edge that the direc­tor of this play is well aware of the objec­tions that a gen­der-aware, twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry read­er might have to her perspective. 

In one scene, Bar­bara props her young child on her lap for elo­cu­tion lessons, dig­ging a knuck­le in between J.’s ribs with every offen­sive work­ing-class Brook­lyn vow­el sound. The book as a whole is like just such a les­son, in which the fever­ish, dying Bar­bara digs her fin­ger into all the ugli­est scenes of her life — of being a woman and a Jew in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, of human exis­tence in gen­er­al. The process of dying is iso­lat­ing, dis­gust­ing, undig­ni­fied. Yet, judg­ing by Barbara’s rec­ol­lec­tions, so is the process of liv­ing. Rosenberg’s great tal­ent lies in bal­anc­ing the ten­der and the repul­sive so care­ful­ly that all of Barbara’s worst traits feel noth­ing more than deeply, trag­i­cal­ly human.