“How Things Ought to Be”: An Exploration of Trauma, the Divine, and Queer Resilience (Fiction Review)
Remi Recchia
Maybe…I dwelled too much on the helpless chaos of the past. Holding grudges was the Jewish version of mindfulness, an outdated survival skill from forty years in the desert with no signposts except the mirage of how things ought to be. — Jendi Reiter, Origin Story
I’ve never read a book quite like Origin Story. Set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and theological problems like the Binding of Isaac, the novel follows the story of Peter Edelman, a gay Jewish man, peer mentor for troubled teens, and aspiring writer, as he attempts to uncover the sexual trauma from his past that has colored his current interpersonal relationships. Some readers will recognize Origin Story as a narrative in the same universe as Jendi Reiter’s 2016 novel, Two Natures, which foregrounds the inner workings of Julian Selkirk, Peter’s partner, though Origin Story does not read like a sequel: It is a universe in and of itself. While I was first introduced to Reiter’s work as a deliciously humorous poet, Origin Story—though funny at times—pulls the reader into a deep, uncertain landscape. It asks the reader, what do you do when you’ve been hurt in the most taboo way, knowing that there will be few—if any—repercussions for your abuser? How do you live with yourself and others after you have been violated? How do you inhabit a body?
To that point, Origin Story is full of bodies. We have Peter’s physical embodiment of trauma in the form of his substance abuse; Julian’s flamboyant style with which he decorates his own body; The Poison Cure comic series, in which a superhero can heal others, that develops throughout the book; and, of course, the sex. Aside from Peter’s trips to a local sex dungeon, where he engages in BDSM in a seeming attempt to heal from his past, the book opens with one of many tantalizing erotic scenes between Peter and Julian.
What is most striking to me about the sense of embodiment in Origin Story, however, is its craft and form, or, to put it another way, the body of the actual book. The nearly 400-page novel is structured in such a way that the narrative rotates through different dimensions. I say “dimensions” instead of “settings” or “storylines” because of their inseparability. The fragments that make up Origin Story intersect and echo one another, much like a mirror between Heaven and Earth. Scattered throughout the pages is, for example, emailed correspondence between Julian and Brent, a sexually repressed gay man still cleaving to Republican family values. Other threads include theological discourse by Rabbi Saul Hauser (Peter’s late grandfather), Gateway House intake notes, and The Poison Cure manuscript—and more. Always more. Origin Story is nothing if not a simultaneously careful and exhilarating palace of introspection and desire.
This desire is, of course, not without its complications. Just as Peter yearns for both intimacy with and distance from Julian, so, too, as Rabbi Saul Hauser points out, does Abraham wish to carry out God’s will and (subconsciously) create false ideas of Him—ideas that may border on idolatry. “Greater than reasonableness is the wisdom of Abraham’s knife,” writes Saul. And, a short while later, “Will we risk even our relationship with ‘G-d’ to do G-d’s true will?” The Akedah, or the Binding of Isaac, is the Biblical story in which God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story has frustrated scholars in the Abrahamic religious traditions for ages. Essentially, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of his loyalty to Him. When Abraham dutifully leads Isaac to the slaughter and prepares to kill him, an angel of the Lord intervenes at the last minute; Abraham is instructed to stop. It would seem that his willingness, not completion, is enough to show his devotion. One of the problems that many scholars and people of faith have is one with Abraham. What could possibly convince you to kill your own child? they ask. And if it’s God, what kind of God would ask you to do that?
What Reiter reveals in Saul’s theological musings is not a hard-and-fast answer. In fact, it doesn’t seem to me that there is one. What Reiter does reveal, however, is that the rich heritage of Jewish thought can be applied to address the worst kind of family betrayal: incest. At the risk of complicating Akedah analogies, just as Isaac is bound to an altar at Moriah, Peter is bound to the altar of a family member’s sexual predation. Further on the topic of Saul, although the reader does not meet him as a living character, Saul’s literary tendencies live on in his grandson, as Peter is a collaborator on The Poison Cure, a comic book series that he’s writing with Ty/Tai Wick.
It is in the character of Ty/Tai that Reiter plays with gender identity. While words such as “gender-nonconforming” or “nonbinary” were not as readily available in the time period in which this novel is set, a contemporary reader might identify the character Ty/Tai as transfeminine with a dash of gender-fluidity. Tai is a teenager living at Gateway House seeking foster placement. While living at Gateway House, Tai is under the mentorship of Peter. While the two of them share in common the reality of being queer at the tail end of the AIDS crisis, what truly binds them together is The Poison Cure. Their comic book, as Peter explains to an interested editor, is about AIDS, but it does more than represent the disease as poison. Says Peter:
Or you could say AIDS itself is a metaphor for the fear of otherness and contamination that’s really universal, timeless. Who isn’t afraid of letting a lover see their dirty secrets? What gay kid hasn’t secretly rooted for the monster in the horror movie because the ‘normal’ world is one where we shouldn’t exist? What I want to do here is bring that into the open, complicate the idea of good and evil so it looks like our real lives, instead of having to read ourselves into some caricatured bad guy who’s predestined to lose.
The well-versed reader will hear Susan Sontag in this argument, yes, but also a greater argument for literature at large. To complicate the idea of good and evil so it looks like our real lives—that is exactly what the best literary fiction does, and in this age of queer erasure and dehumanization, that is why this novel is needed. Origin Story is wonderfully complex and explosive, and while it resists a fairytale ending, it offers something better than closure. It offers hope and a glimpse of how things ought to be.
