On femme lit

Like Son. Felicia Luna Lemus. New York: Akashic Books, 2007.



I feel a little behind the times talking about T. Cooper and Felicia Luna Lemus. Even though I purchased both Lipschitz Six and Like Son months ago, I just got around to them now as the summer reading bug hit me. In the meantime, both authors of this literary power couple have achieved a little bit of well-deserved notariety, exemplified by this interview on Queeerty and a photo spread in Curve Magazine. All of which served to demonstrate to me that these two are one hot couple. Seriously. I want to pin up the Curve photos of them in my room so I can drool. But for all their hotness as a couple, their books each deserve individual attention and not much good is served by comparing them, so I will try to talk about Like Son on its own.

And, independent of all other thoughts and issues, Like Son kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. While it may not be the perfect book, it made me happy because it captured an attitude toward feminity that resonated with me. I didn't exactly love or identify with the main character, who is a disaffected punk transguy. I believe the character is interesting and well-crafted, but somehow he didn't feel right to me. He wasn't the heart and soul of the novel, even though he was the main character, and that in itself is a fascinating literary choice. The power and excitement in Like Son lies in its female characters, the mysterious historical figure of Nahui Olin, a bohemian artist and poet from Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s and the equally mysterious figure of Nathalie, the protagonist's beautifully femme girlfriend.

For me, the utterly brilliant scene that exemplifies this book at its best occurs when the protagonist, Frank, first meets Nathalie. Within the story, "meeting Nathalie was like being hit by a force of nature" (98), but that held true for me as well. Lemus' depiction of this unique, flawed, creatively glamorous woman seduced me from the first hint of her appearance, foreshadowed by the narrator's revelation that "I can't tell you how many times I later wished I could go back to warn my naive self: Yes, she will be complicated. And yes, it'll be hot. But seriously, fool, brace yourself. Loving her will be the hardest thing you'll ever know"(32). From her first appearance, Nathalie is all colors and scents and textures and layers of femninity: "I smelled her breath as she laughed. Bergamot and peppermint and just a hint of expensive vodka. She had on this wrinkeld vintage Ginger Rogers copper-orange ballroom gown, teetering faux-leopard fur open-toe platform heels, and a rust-colored rabbit fur jacket -- an outfit that would have looked like costumed ridiculous on anybody else, but on her was just right. Her flyaway auburn hair was a tangled mess of a Vargas girl updo. Her perfume was incredibly sweet, almost too sweet, like rice milk about to turn" (99). As the relationship between Frank and Nathalie develops, she somehow remains distant and mysterious, her actions inexplicable but alluring. Thoughout the book, I want to know more about her, understand her motivations, hear the story from her perspective. In many ways, though I don't really identify with Frank on a personal level, I am drawn into his fascination with this woman and placed in his position and that is a beautiful experience.

The thing is, I don't want to be Frank. I want to be Nathalie. Like Son is one of a few books that fosters and inspires my own femininity. As I was reading it, I felt more and more inspired to play up and play with my own femininity. I find myself wearing more skirts and dresses, putting on more makeup for going out, lusting after new clothes. It's the kind of book that inspires me to enjoy femininity, layering on too much glitter and gold nail polish and wacky accessories. Reading this book made me want to be more femme.

The character of Nathalie, with Nahui Olin as her historical referent, is a magnificent femme captured in a way that I rarely find in novels, and I'm sad that it's Frank that gets to do all the talking about her. I'd love to hear her voice more. It makes me want to think, though, about books I've read in the past. It seems that there would be many great novels in which a man (or woman, really) meets and is mesmerized by a woman so that she becomes the center of the novel, though without a voice of her own. But I can't necessarily think of examples. Perhaps Lolita? And are there novels with femme voices? When do you get to hear the perspective of women consciously cultivating feminity? What other books might make me feel femme? Or does writing about femininity instantly devolve into chick lit obsessed with men and shopping? Can a powerful femme character be the center of the novel, or does she become something else when the story is told from her perspective and she can no longer be mysterious? Are there queer femme fiction writers out there I should be reading?

Anyway, I may be missing the point of the book, since it really is also a beautiful and engaging story of a queer masculine protagonist fighting toward maturity and learning to leave his personal and imagined history behind. I loved Like Son and I'm decidedly inspired to find more queer femme writing if I can. I will immediately be reading Lemus' first book, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, even though I'm highly skeptical about the phrase "dyke princess" which appears in several of the blurbs about the book. But I'll gladly take recommendations of other femme writing. I'd love to find more books that feel as beautiful and resonant and inspiring in queer ways as this one did.