Starred review from April 9, 2018
Academic intrigue meets the 18th-century underworld in Rosenberg’s astonishing and mesmerizing debut, which juxtaposes queer and trans theory, slave narrative, heroic romance, postcolonial analysis, and speculative fiction. The story appears in the form of an ostensibly historical document and lengthy discursive footnotes. In a 2018 not entirely recognizable as our own, transgender university professor R. Voth happens upon an apparently unread 1724 manuscript entitled “Confessions of the Fox.” It purports to be the memoirs of real-life 18th-century British folk hero Jack Sheppard, whose crimes and jailbreaks transfixed his contemporaries and inspired works including Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. But this Jack was born female, falls in love with a mixed-race sex worker, and clashes with a ring of conspirators attempting to monetize a potentially priceless masculinizing elixir. Some of the footnotes Voth appends as he edits the manuscript cite scholarly references. Others are glosses on the 18th-century slang with which the swashbuckling and often sexually charged action is narrated. Still others recount Voth’s own travails: broke and lonely, he must also contend with a shadowy publisher-cum-pharmaceutical company hoping to cash in on the manuscript’s value. Rosenberg is an ebullient and witty storyteller as well as a painstaking scholar. Like the Sheppard of most earlier tellings, his Jack is an entertaining “artist of transgression” who sheds shackles with ease. Yet the novel is most memorable when evoking the pain behind such liberations: the constraints of individual and collective bodies, and the infinite guises of the yearning to break free. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.
Starred review from May 1, 2018
In this inventive debut, Rosenberg transforms the legend of Jack Sheppard, infamous 18th-century London thief, into an epic queer love story.When Dr. R. Voth, "a guy by design, not birth," discovers a "mashed and mildewed pile of papers" at a university library book sale, he becomes obsessed with transcribing and documenting its contents. The manuscript appears to be a retelling of the Jack Sheppard legend, but it contains a marked difference: Jack was not born Jack, but P--, a young girl with a knack for making and fixing things. P-- escapes indentured servitude and falls into the arms of Bess Khan, a prostitute of South Asian descent, who sees Jack as he longs to be seen. Together, the two lovers hatch schemes that take them across plague-ridden London, dodging the police state and the sinister grasp of Jonathan Wild, "Thief-Catcher General," who has it out for Jack. Meanwhile, in the manuscript's margins, Voth suffers at the hands of the crumbling state university and its exploitative administration. As punishment for frittering away his office hours, Voth must share the discovery of the manuscript with the "Dean of Surveillance" and a dubious corporate sponsor who leers at Jack's story and, by extension, Voth's humanity. "But you yourself are a--," the sponsor ventures to Voth in an explanation he doesn't have the guts to complete. Through a series of revealing footnotes, Voth traces queer theories of the archive as well as histories of incarceration, colonialism, and quack medicine practiced on the subjugated body. As the stories in the footnotes and the manuscript intertwine, the dual narrative shifts and snakes between voices and registers, from an 18th-century picaresque romp to an academic satire. Even when Rosenberg, a scholar of 18th-century literature and queer/trans theory at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, allows Voth to become pedantic, it's in the service of this novel's marvelous ambition: To show how easily marginalized voices are erased from our histories--and that restoring those voices is a disruptive project of devotion.A singular, daring, and thrilling novel: political, sexy, and cunning as a fox.
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Starred review from April 15, 2018
Resonant of George Saunders, of Nikolai Gogol, and of nothing that's ever been written before, professor of literature and queer/trans theory Rosenberg's debut is a triumph. This eighteenth-century, anti-imperialist, anticapitalist love story tells the tale of notorious transgender thief Jack Sheppard. A rare manuscript of Sheppard's memoirs is discovered in the present day by university professor Dr. Voth, also trans, whom readers get to know through the novel's lengthy footnotes. Dr. Voth annotates Jack's life and affair with fearless sex worker Bess, including both personal and professional details. For example, Voth will provide literary evidence of time-period colloquialisms in one note and describe an ill-fated date with his pharmacist in the next. As the antique manuscript unfolds, things grow increasingly difficult for partners in crime Jack and Bess. The deadly plague encroaches on their English hovel, as do heartless mercantilism and a brutal police force. Their fury at being squashed by corrupt institutions resonates with Voth when he is fired from the university, midproject. Both narratives come to a head when it is discovered that the manuscript has been touched by generations of editors and revisionists, and Voth must reckon with the notion that this doesn't diminish the importance of Jack's story for the trans community. Irreverent, erudite, and not to be missed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)