What I've Been Reading: Nevada
In this newly-reissued classic, Imogen Binnie writes a trans take on the Great American Road Trip.
From On The Road to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a handful of the world’s most critically-acclaimed books have centred the Great American Road Trip. Usually, these stories chart the emotional development of messy, flawed white guys, against a backdrop of beautiful scenery and a heavy sprinkling of drugs, debauchery and chaos.
In 2013, writer Imogen Binnie threw her own hat into this fabled ring with Nevada, a trans take on a genre that heavily favours straight white men.
There are reasons for this, safety being one of them. To pack up your shit and travel the country alone is a privilege few can afford, and not just in financial terms. Sylvia Plath famously summed it up, explaining that her “consuming desire” to “mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers… to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night” is “spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery.” Marginalised people often don’t have the luxury of being carefree and reckless, of traveling without looking over their shoulder. In this sense, the mere existence of Nevada is liberating.
Perhaps surprisingly, in Nevada it takes over 100 pages for the road trip to actually begin. The story begins in New York, inside the head of Maria Griffiths, a defiantly punk trans woman who documents her every thought online for her avid followers. Maria’s life is crumbling slowly: her long-term relationship is maybe over, and not even her unionised status can save her bookstore job. When Maria isn’t tanked on whisky, she’s smoking weed and riding her beloved bike for hours through the city’s seemingly endless streets.
Most of the action takes place inside Maria’s head. With her razor-sharp wit and sarcasm, she pulls no punches. This passage from the second chapter is exemplary:
“Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they’re at least as boring as everyone else. Oh, neurosis! Oh, trauma! Oh, look at me, my past messed me up and I’m still working through it! Despite the impression you might get from daytime talk shows and dumb movies, there isn’t anything particularly interesting there. Although, Maria might be biased.”
Ironically, as the story unfolds we see the extent to which the stigma and pathologisation of transness makes Maria second-guess every one of her flaws, and usually come up with a trans-related justification. This is the genius of Nevada: it paints trans people as just like anyone else, but examines the mental impact trans stigma has on our everyday thought processes. We are just as boring and mundanely fucked-up as everyone else, but our treatment as aliens means we internalise the idea that we’re wildly different, and that everything wrong in our life can be attributed to our transness.
Of course, it’s not that our transness is inherently wrong; it’s that society treats it as such, and makes our lives shitty as a result.
Maria’s impromptu road trip, enabled by the kind-of-theft of her ex-girlfriend’s car, leads her to the West Coast for no reason other than the fact she’s never actually seen it. In Star City, Nevada, she stumbles into a local Wal-Mart and lays eyes on James Hanson, a young stoner with a penchant for trans porn and a repressed desire to wear dresses. Maria sees plenty of her younger self in James – in her own words, “this kid’s trans and he doesn’t even know it yet” – so ends up befriending him by getting stoned and falling asleep in his apartment. No spoilers, but James’ exploration of his own gender and his immediate resonance with Maria offers a no-holds-barred insight into the mental process of wrestling with transness, one which – thank GOD – isn’t remotely diluted or compromised for a cis audience.
Arguably, this is Nevada’s greatest strength. It’s a novel about trans stuff written for trans readers, a standpoint which allows Binnie to make Maria as messy, flawed and fucked-up as so many of the white guy Road Trip protagonists that came before her. It’s been described as the novel that “invented” a new school of trans literature, inspiring the likes of Casey Plett and Torrey Peters to write their own dysfunctional dynamics in order to broaden the scope of what trans characters are allowed to be.
Whether you agree with this analysis or not, Nevada’s combination of sarcasm, punk spirit and razor-sharp analysis of trans experiences makes it undeniably worthy of its status as a trans classic.