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A review by mafiabadgers
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg
medium-paced
- Loveable characters? No
1.0
First read 12/2024
This was certainly a book that thought it was awfully hot shit, but, unfortunately, I'm really not convinced. The 'manuscript' portion of the novel, which makes up the bulk of it, simply didn't pull me in, which made it difficult for it to pull off any of the more complex thematic stuff. The relationship between Jack and Bess is central to the book, but outside of Jack's constant lusting after Bess, what is there between them? What's left? If the book said they had an amicable sex worker/john relationship from which they both benefited, then fine, but the book insists that they're lovers. We certainly don't see that. Remove the ogling and the frequent sex scenes, the plot-necessary conspiring, and the occasional fights over politics (which inevitably resolve in Bess muttering something about 'Anglos!' and storming off in a huff)—and they barely interact with each other.
The book critiques Herculine Barbin for centring her narrative so firmly around her relationships with women, then goes on to insist on Jack's gallantry for not describing Bess' breasts in explicit detail—even though he's constantly talking about her body. I don't expect fictional characters from 18th Century London to be totally respectful and politically correct, but there's a conflict between what I'm seeing and what the editor's footnotes are telling me. The sex scenes themselves have that fascinatingly painful characteristic that sex scenes get when the writer tries to reinvent the wheel, but in a more literary fashion: lots of "her Flower opened to me" type stuff. It's tiresome, I don't care, and it's not even hot. If you want a good blend of the profane and the political, try Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography.
The book has a lot of footnotes from the editor, who has no qualms about chronicling their own sexual escapades and hangups à la Johnny Truant, although Confessions is never so stylistically daring as House of Leaves, nor does the story told in the footnotes have nearly so much bearing on the text. I enjoyed it very much to begin with, as it satirised—or, even more disturbingly, perhaps simply observed—academia's rising culture of micro-managerialism, surveillance, and corporate partner-/ownership. After a while, though, it had devolved into various mopey reminiscences about the editor's ex (with further sex scenes, more anaemic than arousing), before eventually launching into an uninspired story about a liberating escape and the discovery of a new home. At times the footnotes try to convey in hokey ways that the editor has interrupted his masturbation in order to write said footnotes, which have em dashes strategically placed to suggest gasping breath and fractured 'speech'. Nobody writes like this.
There's also, at one point, a mention of "British English" in relation to pronunciation, and in a text that's so concerned with othering and language (use of cant, for example), it really grates on me that it seems to think there is only one British English, only one pronunciation. It always irks me when Americans writing England books aren't fully awake to the importance of regional accents/dialects and how deeply this is tied up with classism. But in making these accusations of un-realness, am I not playing into precisely the trap that has been set? The book explicitly addresses the problem of authenticity and the archive, or tries to, at any rate. There are many references to works I'm not familiar with, but I can't say I'm impressed by Rosenberg's work with Freud, Foucault, or Derrida. The Foucault in particular was particularly grating: he deals with power and effect, not conspiracies, but the book explicitly links Foucault to the plot about the authorities falsifying a plague in order to clamp down on the populace. This way of thinking, the easy blaming of sinister, malevolent cabals, rather than the more complex outcomes of well-meaning actions taken in accordance with historically situated modes of thinking, would go on to become popular just two years later, during the pandemic. Of course Rosenberg cannot be held personally responsible for that, but it's disappointing to see Foucault reduced to this.
I try to set my academic work aside when I write Storygraph reviews, but this book is so deeply bound up in theory that it's difficult to resist the urge. Unfortunately, truly taking it to task would take more time and effort than I'm willing to commit. So I will resort to saying that the characters were stunted, the plot was silly, the many sex scenes wearisome, and it didn't pull me in enough to balance out its efforts to juggle so many hefty themes at once. Perhaps try Rita Indiana's Tentacle instead.
This was certainly a book that thought it was awfully hot shit, but, unfortunately, I'm really not convinced. The 'manuscript' portion of the novel, which makes up the bulk of it, simply didn't pull me in, which made it difficult for it to pull off any of the more complex thematic stuff. The relationship between Jack and Bess is central to the book, but outside of Jack's constant lusting after Bess, what is there between them? What's left? If the book said they had an amicable sex worker/john relationship from which they both benefited, then fine, but the book insists that they're lovers. We certainly don't see that. Remove the ogling and the frequent sex scenes, the plot-necessary conspiring, and the occasional fights over politics (which inevitably resolve in Bess muttering something about 'Anglos!' and storming off in a huff)—and they barely interact with each other.
The book critiques Herculine Barbin for centring her narrative so firmly around her relationships with women, then goes on to insist on Jack's gallantry for not describing Bess' breasts in explicit detail—even though he's constantly talking about her body. I don't expect fictional characters from 18th Century London to be totally respectful and politically correct, but there's a conflict between what I'm seeing and what the editor's footnotes are telling me. The sex scenes themselves have that fascinatingly painful characteristic that sex scenes get when the writer tries to reinvent the wheel, but in a more literary fashion: lots of "her Flower opened to me" type stuff. It's tiresome, I don't care, and it's not even hot. If you want a good blend of the profane and the political, try Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography.
The book has a lot of footnotes from the editor, who has no qualms about chronicling their own sexual escapades and hangups à la Johnny Truant, although Confessions is never so stylistically daring as House of Leaves, nor does the story told in the footnotes have nearly so much bearing on the text. I enjoyed it very much to begin with, as it satirised—or, even more disturbingly, perhaps simply observed—academia's rising culture of micro-managerialism, surveillance, and corporate partner-/ownership. After a while, though, it had devolved into various mopey reminiscences about the editor's ex (with further sex scenes, more anaemic than arousing), before eventually launching into an uninspired story about a liberating escape and the discovery of a new home. At times the footnotes try to convey in hokey ways that the editor has interrupted his masturbation in order to write said footnotes, which have em dashes strategically placed to suggest gasping breath and fractured 'speech'. Nobody writes like this.
There's also, at one point, a mention of "British English" in relation to pronunciation, and in a text that's so concerned with othering and language (use of cant, for example), it really grates on me that it seems to think there is only one British English, only one pronunciation. It always irks me when Americans writing England books aren't fully awake to the importance of regional accents/dialects and how deeply this is tied up with classism. But in making these accusations of un-realness, am I not playing into precisely the trap that has been set? The book explicitly addresses the problem of authenticity and the archive, or tries to, at any rate. There are many references to works I'm not familiar with, but I can't say I'm impressed by Rosenberg's work with Freud, Foucault, or Derrida. The Foucault in particular was particularly grating: he deals with power and effect, not conspiracies, but the book explicitly links Foucault to the plot about the authorities falsifying a plague in order to clamp down on the populace. This way of thinking, the easy blaming of sinister, malevolent cabals, rather than the more complex outcomes of well-meaning actions taken in accordance with historically situated modes of thinking, would go on to become popular just two years later, during the pandemic. Of course Rosenberg cannot be held personally responsible for that, but it's disappointing to see Foucault reduced to this.
I try to set my academic work aside when I write Storygraph reviews, but this book is so deeply bound up in theory that it's difficult to resist the urge. Unfortunately, truly taking it to task would take more time and effort than I'm willing to commit. So I will resort to saying that the characters were stunted, the plot was silly, the many sex scenes wearisome, and it didn't pull me in enough to balance out its efforts to juggle so many hefty themes at once. Perhaps try Rita Indiana's Tentacle instead.