“I saw my parents at a riot once.”
In the opening vignette of Isaac Fellman’s mesmerizing new novel Notes from a Regicide, the narrator, Griffon Keming, recounts stumbling on the scene of his septuagenarian parents sinking a police boat. The action takes place during an uprising in a post-climate-catastrophe New York City of a fractured yet somehow vibrant far future. His mother, Zaffre, teases his father, Etoine, who is in the boat piercing the hull: “Look out now, a butch has a multitool.” And then, with the wrecked boat sinking, she reaches down and picks him straight up out of the boat; a powerful woman gently lifting her much smaller, beloved husband onto the dock. The two totter away without ever seeing their son.
The ache of Griffon’s exclusion from their perfect cocoon of rebellion and t4t affection is stitched into every miraculous page of Fellman’s book. This is a novel which—despite epic subjects like Revolution! Art! Transition! Addiction! Love! Family!—is actually a very quiet book, muted in the way that fond memories of people who hurt you often are. Griffon explains his tone: “[O]f course the grand stories we hope for are often not the real ones—the real ones are too complicated, or too simple, to be grand. Here they miss, or here exceed the mark.”
As an author of speculative fiction, Fellman is not interested in the hows and whys of magic or the supernatural. But he is a master of the who. For readers of his earlier work, the same empathy and insight are here, but sharper and more aching. The scope of Notes from a Regicide is far more ambitious, as well—deeper and wider than his previous work—and far more successful. The book is driven by a small cast of unforgettable characters, especially Griffon’s exiled, Prince-killing parents, whose connections and disconnections across decades are the bulk of the narrative.
Zaffre and Etoine are a quintessential mismatch: She is brilliant at living life and terrible at surviving; and he gropes along from one mishap to another, grumbling the whole way. They are both artists, but clash over the use of their talents. Like most queer and trans elders, they wear the scars of their history in plain sight. As parents, they make life possible for Griffon as a trans man, but they don’t always make it easy. Instead of being in the forefront where you’d expect the plot of a book about regicide would be, details of their involvement in the murder of their homeland’s ruler, Prince Stephen, seep into the novel through kitchen table jokes and spontaneous asides. A sort of triple auto/biography of Griffon and the already elderly couple who took him in at age fifteen, the book interlaces their family history with Etoine’s prison journals, written while awaiting execution for his role in the regicide. Etoine’s journal is largely about his love of Zaffre, whom he believes dead.
Through Etoine’s account, the strange world of his parents’ lost home emerges: “[A] fairytale city, the fever dream of people who lived thousands of years ago and still had not died.” The bizarre oligarchy of Stephensport rested on keeping its founders in a mysterious stasis (or maybe buried alive), to be woken every generation to select a new Prince. The feel of the city-state is half Venice at the peak of its empire, and half Austria-Hungary on the eve of its collapse.
Despite being arrested twice by this teetering regime, Etoine is the less political of the novel’s central pair. His life feels accidental, out of control in the way that many addicts’ lives are, lurching forward through history. His first arrest and imprisonment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of Etoine’s relationship to the rebels, but of why rebellions happen, and how art is given meaning by its context.
The source of his trouble is a portrait he painted in his youth for the family of a past Prince. The image is later taken up by the revolution as a symbol of anti-Stephen sentiment. The work is both responsible for launching Etoine’s career as an elite portrait painter and later his persecution and misery. While he is ambivalent about the portrait’s political fate, though, the painting is significant to him for a private reason: The model for the historical Prince was Zaffre. To his mind, if the painting holds any power, it is because it embodies his reverence for her, and the seeds of their midlife love affair.
A revolutionary, for her part Zaffre cannot bring herself to make her own work, instead painting forgeries to support the movement. The fluctuations in both artists’ careers nevertheless circle around the social uses of art, touching on issues of authorship and commodification. Fellman clearly does not think the wealthy’s ability to own art (or commission it) means anything in terms of understanding or controlling it. Meeting Etoine again after his first spell in jail, for example, she argues with him over the meaning of propaganda:
“And all your paintings say the same thing,” she said, “which is that no matter how these people act or what they’re like or what they do, they’re powerful, they’re eternal, they’re beautiful […] Maybe part of the reason I can’t paint anything for myself is that I don’t want to paint propaganda, all right? […] Propaganda for my ass, that I’m such a special painter, because I’m crazy, because I’m poor and a peasant, because that means something so goddamned special and magical about me that I deserve my own cult. That reason alone, and not my talent, or my thinking.”
Zaffre is, unlike Etoine, driven by conviction and underestimated by the regime. Likewise, although Etoine is devoted to her as an artistic admirer, her lover, and spouse, he cannot comprehend her as an activist. And because this is Griffon’s book about his father’s book, Zaffre appears only as the men in her family remember her, which leaves most of her action in the revolution out of sight.
But this doesn’t diminish the awe in which Griffon and Etoine hold her. “Zaffre always seemed to be opening at a seam somewhere,” Griffon says of his adopted mother, “as if the power that resided in her body could not help but spill out gently or suddenly—not a hot power, but a relaxed one, like water.” Indeed, when describing love—Etoine and Zaffre’s, and later Griffon’s and his husband Marino’s—Notes is a profoundly romantic book. Affectionate and sexy, Fellman’s novel captures the wonder of loving someone through transition. Describing kissing Zaffre, Etoine waxes on:
I was full of a golden happiness, a glittering happiness; I had a star inside me, seething with heat. And nothing mattered as much as her warmth, the fullness and completion of her warmth, and how much I wanted to keep kissing her and kissing her, terrified and ill and trying to flee into her, but to build something with her, too.
But Fellman never romanticizes any of his subjects or their struggles. Love doesn’t cure all ills; Etoine’s alcoholism is ugly and undermining, and Zaffre’s mental illness never abates. There are no simple solutions, not even revolution.
And definitely not transition. Notes is thoroughly trans, saturated with transness; but, like love, transition doesn’t cure all ills for Fellman’s characters. What it does do is allow the imperfect and necessary love that is the backbone of the book’s story to exist.
As complicated as this family history is, it remains full of warmth and humor. Fellman has a terrific ear for the kind of banter long-term partners exchange. When Griffon sees his parents at home after the opening scene at the riot, they deny being there.
“Oh, if you’d been there, you know you would have raised hell,” said Zaffre.
Etoine shrugged. “I guess in the moment, I usually do. I just always expect something to stop me. That’s the trouble I’m afraid of—as if God would stop me. But if God wanted us to not raise hell, he would’ve made natural laws against it. You can’t go mistaking a human law for natural law.”
“You don’t believe in God,” said Zaffre.
“I don’t really believe in laws either,” he said, and took another bite of the candy.
While speculative fiction is chock-full of stories of found family and the healing they provide, they often focus on the fun part: finding a place to belong, building a community of support and reciprocity where one’s biological or cultural origins have failed. “I moved in with Etoine and Zaffre under the same circumstances that they kept moving in with each other,” Griffon explains. “Our family doesn’t reproduce by fucking, but by emergency.”
But Notes is set after the death of Griffon’s complicated parents, and so much of its richness comes from capturing the difficulties bred in a community circumscribed by oppression and exclusion, as well as its peculiar beauties. Like a Titian painting, the radiance of Griffon’s love pushes up out of the landscape of his gloomy disappointment. He knows himself to be an inadequate narrator because of his heartbreak, but his longing provides the indispensable matrix as the novel switches backward and forward in time, changing voice and perspective.
In a passage that sums up his elusive goal of properly describing a life-changing/life-saving set of relationships, Griffon is comforted by a dying Etoine.
“I wish I could tell you everything and nothing of how he lay there, on Zaffre’s side of the bed, and listened to me, and stroked my hand, but I can’t. I thought I had such perfect control of my story, but I don’t. And I wish I did. I wish I could bring myself to put this fragment in the order that I had planned, but it is too sharp, and I can’t touch it without cutting myself.”
But Fellman knows exactly how to arrange the shards of experience that make up a story, and the heartbreaks that make up a person. For this, Notes from a Regicide is as brilliant as it is cutting. It is a masterpiece of the radical risks that constitute queer and trans survival, and the flawed love that creates a family.