Andrew Chan
Jane DeLynn’s newly republished coming-of-age novel set in the pre-Stonewall ’60s is comedic, haunting, and decidedly untidy.
In Thrall, by Jane DeLynn,
Semiotext(e), 311 pages, $17.95
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For some closeted queer kids, the burdensome pressure to declare your identity can result in a kind of openly combative precociousness. If you grow up assuming you’ll be ostracized for something you have no say in, you might reasonably decide to beat the world to the punch with harsh judgments of your own; if you believe a basic fact of your existence is subject to the incomprehension of others, you might understandably create a self-image so unyielding that nobody can get next to you. Like a reluctant performer anticipating being pushed out on stage, the rebellious queer youth learns to disarm and outsmart a hostile audience even before she ever encounters one.
The narrator of Jane DeLynn’s newly republished 1982 novel In Thrall has mastered these self-protective strategies. Right off the bat, in the first sentence, sixteen-year-old Lynn introduces herself with a nonchalant assertion of her desires—“I was always getting crushes on my teachers”—as if daring us to judge her. As hyperconscious as she is of her own inclinations, she delights in sizing up the foibles of the people around her, who lack her air of smug self-possession. Throughout the book, she regularly tosses out criticisms of her square, middle-class Jewish parents, whom she describes as “despots”; mocks her snot-nosed boyfriend for his sexual incompetence, which she endures with a benumbed acceptance at odds with her forceful personality; and delivers withering assessments of the suspected closet cases in her midst.
Lynn is constantly signaling that she is several steps ahead of everyone else, and her knowingness extends to her sexuality. In Thrall is set in the pre-Stonewall early ’60s—an era whose mainstream attitudes toward queer women might be best exemplified by the 1961 film The Children’s Hour, in which Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine play tortured would-be lovers whose never-consummated relationship ends in a tragic death—but Lynn isn’t a convenient victim quietly suffering through the Dark Ages. Though she isn’t out to most of the people in her life, she clearly takes some pride in her carnal self-knowledge, and her closest friends are aware of her sapphic leanings. Lynn certainly struggles to come to terms with her lesbianism and how to be open about it, but the fundamental nature of her desire is treated with a refreshing matter-of-factness that allows us to see it as something much more than a taboo.
It can be wearying to spend hundreds of pages in the mind of a misanthropic teen, and yet DeLynn isn’t afraid of alienating us; the book drills in the repetitive cadences of its heroine’s angst. At the same time, the author’s sharp, playful comic sensibility and her exquisite ear for dialogue shine through. In the early chapters, these qualities are most evident when Lynn applies her New York City prep-school erudition to smart-alecky ends: in one scene, she wittily derails a class discussion about Hamlet by dismissing the hero’s problem as one of sexual frustration; in another, she uses a term-paper assignment on Greek tragedy as an opportunity to lament her own “excess of intelligence.” The protagonist grows more compelling as her tightly wound persona is challenged by a mentor who immediately sees through her. A thirty-seven-year-old English teacher, Miss Maxfeld calls bullshit on her student’s preening displays of superiority, and the pair eventually enter into an illicit affair. From the start, Lynn’s mental agility makes her both a perfect candidate for teacher’s pet and a perpetual nuisance, and it’s the tension between these two potential roles that gives their romance its magnetic charge. While this statutory-rape scenario is undeniably discomfiting, In Thrall manages to see Lynn and Miss Maxfeld’s entanglement in its emotional complexity: as the fortuitous meeting of two souls yearning for connection in an oppressive society; as the result of an adult authority figure’s exploitative exercise of power; and as a teenage lesbian’s world-altering sentimental education.
Whereas Lynn’s parents are exasperated by their daughter’s shenanigans, Miss Maxfeld gives her student what she so evidently craves—attention from an intellectual peer who can one-up her provocation for provocation, insult for insult. Perhaps to mitigate the novel’s scandalous premise, DeLynn offers only a bare outline of a physical relationship; one of the few resonant details of erotic fulfillment is a surreal first kiss that lifts Lynn off her feet. The choice of sexual restraint allows the characters’ banter to serve as the fulcrum of their seduction. Their conversations have the delirious, ping-ponging rhythms of screwball comedy, with Lynn’s bratty grousing reliably followed by Miss Maxfeld’s sarcastic retorts, which come off the page as if voiced by some imperious Hollywood star. And like many screwball classics, In Thrall reveals just how thin a line exists between infatuation and irritation: these lovers, both neurotic in their own fashion, are always on the verge of driving each other mad. But their frenzied miscommunications perpetuate a sense of mystery, the kind on which desire feeds; every attempt to push the other away or establish a boundary becomes an invitation to draw closer.
Lynn insists on her singularity at every turn, at one point describing herself as “drenched in anomaly.” But her sense of being a freak—her suspicion that she is “the oldest sixteen-year-old who ever lived,” and that “there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me”—paradoxically makes her the cliché she fears herself to be: just another lonely teenager. Miss Maxfeld is the sole grown-up who recognizes this contradiction roiling inside her underage paramour. Just as stirring as In Thrall’s evocation of amour fou is its depiction of ’60s America as an informational abyss for queer people, one in which they search desperately for models of how to be, sometimes finding mere mirages of solace and compassion. Standing in contrast to Miss Maxfeld is Lynn’s Uncle Leonard, an ambiguously gay figure who never acknowledges his identity and who betrays Lynn after she confides in him.
It’s an unsettling measure of the catastrophic toll homophobia can have on its victims that Miss Maxfeld—as manipulative as she can be—is Lynn’s only sanctuary. Miss Maxfeld is also the book’s most haunting character; though she is never at a loss for words, she remains enigmatic to us, beyond a few details about her strict conservative rabbi father, her loving relationship with her brother, and her trysts with former students. Like her backstory, the life lessons she shares with Lynn turn out to be mostly ambivalent; as she says in her final soliloquy, “we don’t really know any more about why we think what we think than we do about why we do what we do.” Beginning the novel as the keeper of the queer cultural inheritance Lynn has been deprived of, she ultimately proves as elusive as the wisdom she initially seemed to offer. So many coming-of-age narratives (queer and straight alike) conclude with their protagonists achieving some degree of self-determination, but DeLynn refuses us such a tidy denouement. Instead, she suggests that, in a society that sends even the bravest queer people into hiding, neither the naively defiant youth nor their worldly-wise elders can secure a true, lasting peace within themselves.
Andrew Chan is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Why Mariah Carey Matters, published by University of Texas Press.