Your hurt does not exempt you from living.” None of it, Beagin seems to say, changes the fact that the future is still wide open and unpredictable.

You could do everything in your power to leave the past behind and it could still find you anew. Beagin delivers harsh lessons to both Greta and Big Swiss, suggesting that neither of their approaches to healing is the better than the other. The book is wry, fresh, and absorbing, without flashbacks, maudlin confessions, or self-seriousness … Of course, things don’t go anyone’s way.

They make strange, illogical, and frequently destructive choices. The women act in ways that show their futures aren’t predetermined by their pasts. Instead, they give each other countless orgasms as their dogs hump in the corner of Greta’s farmhouse. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a meditation on those precious acts through which Kris finds her way: the joy of queer parenting and chosen family, the beauty of forgiveness and the resistance inherent in expansive love.”īut the women of Beagin’s story buck those fates. The book also knows that in these circumstances, people suffer they also find love, form networks, make plans. In any case, the novel operates on a level of verisimilitude in life as in the novel, the long struggle for queer people to enjoy open, public lives now meets legislative bigotry across America.Ĭrane’s novel understands that fascism creeps in fits and starts, and that state violence lets some people enjoy ‘normal life’ while others are targeted with grotesque specificity. The mood created by Kris’s interiority-which reflects the jumpiness of living with trauma and surveillance-makes questions raised by the sparsely rendered workings of the state largely irrelevant to the novel’s enjoyment. But the subversive intelligence of the book is its representation of the stolen pleasures and general unease of a hemmed-in life. Kris’s voice is everything in this novel-she’s a morose, prickly, paranoid yet lovable narrator with exquisite comic timing … Readers who like every mechanism and metaphor of control mapped out may be underwhelmed by the novel’s world-building, which is quiet.

“What would 1984 be like if Winston Smith had an endearing personality? Crane’s book gives us a disarming model for life under surveillance. Stewart and Rachel Abrams’ Unscripted, Samuel Moyn on Robert Kagan’s The Ghost at the Feast, and Sam Sacks on Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down.īrought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Lydia Kiesling on Marisa Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, Bindu Bansinath on Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, Adam Davison on James B.

Big swiss jen beagin summary