Widow Bird, from “The Comic Natural History of the Human Race” (1851) Henry Louis Stephens / The Met
Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn (One World, 2026), is narrated by Barbara Rosenberg, a dying Manhattan mother delivering a torrent of OxyContin-fueled recollections about her life and her estranged trans child, who now goes by “J.” The names are not subtle. Rosenberg’s second novel is a radical form of unauthorized fictional memoir. He stages the story within a space of personal reckoning, using Barbara’s voice to examine the ideological and emotional forces that shape a family.
As Barbara lies dying in her apartment, J.—the child she has alienated for years—is the one caring for her.
Barbara organizes her narration as a kind of address to J., recounting what she calls “the beginning of the end”: her decision to marry J.’s father and the eventual collapse of her friendship with a woman named Sugar. Much of the novel’s tension lies in Barbara’s refusal to fully explain that falling-out until the (very satisfying) final act. Instead, she circles the subject through digressions about marriage, motherhood, and her increasingly fragile health, producing a narrative voice that is both compulsively confessional and strategically evasive.
When it comes to Barbara’s references to her child, the novel opens at the endpoint of an already grotesque transformation. In the opening pages, she describes a looming, person-sized bird stalking her apartment, circling her, even plotting her murder. Only shortly afterward does it become clear that this threatening creature is not just a surreal hallucination but her estranged child. As Barbara recounts the events that led to this moment, the reader begins to see how her language has stripped J. of personhood altogether. What might once have been deadnaming has hardened into something stranger: the refusal of any name at all. Within Barbara’s narration, her child becomes a figure onto which fear, confusion, and resentment can be projected without restraint. Meanwhile, it slowly becomes clear that J.—the figure Barbara fears most—is also the person caring for her as she dies.
Reading Barbara’s monologue produces an odd emotional rhythm. At points, I found myself laughing at the sheer camp excess of her voice. Her pronouncements about gender and propriety are delivered with such theatrical certainty that they verge on absurdity. But the laughter never lasts long. The humor collapses as soon as it becomes clear that Barbara experiences these declarations not as exaggerations but as moral obligations—rules she feels compelled to enforce on the people around her, especially her child.
The concerns of Night Night Fawn go beyond the domestic. Rosenberg, also sets up a series of ideological confrontations about nationalism, labor, and Jewish identity. Barbara’s worldview is shaped by fragments of twentieth-century Jewish diasporic culture, particularly her lingering fascination with the 1960 film Exodus, which she remembers seeing in theaters with the man who would become her husband (now dead). Though neither of them watches the film especially closely, they leave imagining themselves as participants in a grand historical project. Israel appears less as a political reality than as an aspirational horizon—an inherited story about belonging and purpose.
Running alongside Barbara’s romanticized Zionism is a persistent current of Marxist critique. Much of it surfaces through Barbara’s memories of Sugar and Sugar’s ex-husband Neil, whose political conversations linger long after the friendship itself collapses. Even her J repeatedly and proudly touts his Marxist ideals and forces related literature upon Barbara while she is incapacitated and unable to care for herself. Somehow, Barbara frequently recounts these past arguments with surprising fluency. Rosenberg offers a narrative explanation for this: Barbara once worked as an assistant to Noam Chomsky, a detail that allows her to casually reference leftist debates about capitalism, imperialism, and commodity fetishism.
Sometimes this works beautifully, giving the novel an unusual ideological texture in which reactionary resentment and theoretical vocabulary occupy the same consciousness. At other moments, it can appear more like a convenient way for Rosenberg to shoehorn leftist ideals into conversations between a largely conservative, Zionist cast of characters. At points, the novel reads like a vehicle for a broader argument about the ways Jewish identity has historically been shaped, and sometimes distorted, by the assumption that Jewishness and Zionism are inseparable.
Yet even when the ideological scaffolding becomes visible, the novel’s emotional core remains compelling. Rosenberg’s most impressive achievement is the unstable empathy he generates for Barbara herself. She can be vicious—openly cruel toward J. in ways that are both self-aware and unapologetic—but the novel refuses to reduce her to a simple villain. Instead, we apprehensively read and cringe at a consciousness shaped by addiction, fear, and a deep conviction that everyone around her is acting selfishly.
By the final act, Barbara’s language about J. has become still more unhinged. In one paranoid vision she insists that “the bird is trying to murder me.” It is a horrifying statement from a mother about her trans child, yet it also raises an unsettling possibility: that this grotesque hallucination may be the only way Barbara can process the reality of her child’s transition at all. Her language strips J. of humanity, but it also registers—however distortedly—that transformation has occurred.
The tragedy of Night Night Fawn is that Barbara can only recognize that transformation by turning it into something inhuman.
