Normalcy? In This Economy?

Precarious jobs catering to strange fetishes are the new normal for the protagonists of Mac Crane’s short story collection Perverts, a literary/speculative fiction crossover that hides a tender heart beneath its disorienting surfaces. 

George Saunders is name-checked in the epigraph, a clear forefather of these tales about workplace setups where ghoulish concepts are given a veneer of corporate cheer with title caps and a trademark symbol. In contrast to Saunders’ increasingly bleak outlook (as evinced by his latest collection, the ironically titled Liberation Day), Crane nearly always ends their stories with a protagonist’s movement out of numbness and toward the hope of intimacy. Sometimes the strategies to bring about that volta feel repetitive as the book goes on, but there’s plenty of wit and juiciness to make the trip entertaining.

Most of the narrators or main characters in this sixteen-story collection are nonbinary assigned-female, in their twenties or thirties, fluid in sexual orientation but with a penchant for authoritative older women to heal their mother-wounds. They’ve never known a time when the nuclear family, and the economy that propped it up and catered to it, provided them any real security. 

They’re largely still at an age when it’s fun and transgressive to live in a scruffy apartment, with so many roommates sharing one bathroom that you have to pee in the yard, but they see this lifestyle’s expiration date fast approaching. The person they call their “therapist” might be the woman they hooked up with after their ex’s ex kissed her at Pride, whether or not she’s also an actual therapist. So it’s logical, as well as amusing (when it isn’t tragic, or maybe especially when it is), that if someone wants to buy your stinky panties on the Internet, or hires you to flatter her husband by pretending you had a great hookup when he was blackout drunk, of course you take the money.

Misdirection is one of Crane’s favorite tricks, a fitting choice for a book about people who start out alienated from their bodies and feelings as well as their labor. In the opening story, “Smear the Queer”—one of the tightest and most incisive in the book—the business in question caters to straight men who pay to inflict homophobic violence on the employees. It’s a dark parody of an inclusive workplace, where a cis girlboss rides herd on a team of nonbinary people and gay twinks. Crane raises the stakes by making the narrator about to take a big step forward in their romantic relationship, setting us up for what TV Tropes calls “Retirony”. We’ve seen this move too often, even if we don’t know the term for it; for instance, the guy who dies on that one last mission before getting his pension. What happens in “Smear the Queer” is less predictable but no less devastating.

Similarly, the book dodges mainstream transgender story arcs, when it’s not satirizing them outright. In “The Failed Messiah,” the narrator gets paid to peg and force-femme a sad-sack rich guy in order to afford a “procedure”—don’t assume it’s top surgery! The sharply funny “Your Damning Yelp Review” features a stealth trans woman whose job is to play Ms. Frizzle on a version of The Magic School Bus called “The Transperience™”. In this simulation, cis women pretend they are going inside someone famous who just came out as trans—as the narrator archly describes the job, “it’s up to us to shrink and travel through their body so we can figure out what’s wrong and fix them.” In what may be an actual letter, or may be the fantasy screed we all keep in our drafts email folder, Ms. Frizzle confronts a Karen customer about the sexual fascination underlying her obsession with trans bodies. (No lie, before I realized I was trans and bisexual, the real-life Ms. Frizzle’s smoky voice gave me a lot of feelings when I watched the show with my small child. Tell me again to take chances and get messy!)

It would be too simple, though, to cast these marginalized characters as only victims of circumstance. Their lack of agency is sort of their kink, at least at the outset. They know very well that the baroque scenarios that pay their bills and dampen their crotches are elaborate defenses against feeling certain losses that recur (perhaps too often) throughout the collection: childhood dysphoria, cruel or absent mothers, that one unforgettable ex-girlfriend, the children they couldn’t have or couldn’t protect. 

Crane acknowledges how banal and tiresome our common woes can be in “The Cycle of Pitiless Impulses,” a comical horror story about a mad therapist who has trapped a bunch of people to reenact their traumas in a weekly puppet show until the ever-receding day when they’re pronounced “cured.” At their best, the weird premises in Perverts liberate their themes from narrative realism’s single meaning. “Cycle” could be read through a trans lens as a critique of the way we have to distort our authentic story into inauthentic forms so that we can be granted healthcare and political support. It also works as a general admonishment that for healing to occur, introspection must at some point yield to action.

And these characters sure do get a lot of action! Perverts is full of squirting, fingering, vibrators, life-changing kisses, and of course, meaningful lesbian glances. Yet intimacy, if it ever arrives, does so as a terrifying and delightful surprise. 

The deepest connections are sometimes those where sexuality is beside the point. The title story transforms an awkwardly sexless orgy into a sweet scene of maternal care that heals the giver as well as the receivers, with the host singing a nursery rhyme “to the perverts who weren’t perverts.” This negation is not respectability politics—it’s an ethical refusal to maintain the hierarchy between watcher and watched, between those whose bodies “naturally” take up space and those who have to commodify or explain their bodies to survive. Newborn babies in adult bodies, we are all polymorphously perverse, never too old or too normal to need the touch of skin on skin.