Barbara Horowitz’s dream was to be a Hollywood star. Failing that, her backup dream was to marry a surgeon. The main thing was to get out of Flatbush, Brooklyn. So when she started going steady with Stephen Rosenberg, who “carried the lawns of Nyack in his heart,” she thought she had it made—until her medical-student beau had an epiphany that he was terrified of blood, and a concurrent epiphany about his true calling as a public-health official.

Instead of dumping him, though, Barbara invited Stephen to a screening of Exodus, the 1960 film starring Paul Newman as the Haganah militant Ari Ben Canaan and Eva Marie Saint as his blond, goyishe love interest. The film depicts the intensifying violence that by 1948 would culminate in the Nakba. “As a literary work, it isn’t much,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once said of the best-selling novel on which the film was based. “But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”

Barbara always understood perfectly well that taking Stephen to the movies was a potentially self-destructive act. Once they’d tucked themselves into the makeout row in the back, her hand levitated into Stephen’s lap and proceeded to extract his penis from his pants, a penis that she could not allow “to follow Stephen down the path of meek liberalism.” It wasn’t love and acceptance that led Barbara (and her hand) astray, but rather the conviction that she could change him. “Destiny was driving me toward disappointment,” she recalled. Stephen asked her to marry him right then and there.

At first, she froze. But as Exodus itself climaxed, Barbara was overwhelmed by a newfound sense of purpose: “I had not given much thought to ‘nations’ before. But a nation combined with Paul Newman was another thing entirely.” When Stephen suggested later that maybe he could find a job in Israel, Barbara’s assimilationist dreams gave way to Zionist ones. Stephen would give up his aspirations of climbing America’s class ladder, but only to take on Paul Newman’s character’s nationalist convictions (and maybe his sex appeal, too). And she would become his Eva Marie Saint, forsaking her ordinary life for a colonial adventure.

Jordy Rosenberg’s novel Night Night Fawn traces the collapse of this fantasy and all of Barbara’s other thwarted ambitions. Said ambitions end up being displaced onto her only daughter, who turns out to be an incorrigible lesbian, an intractable Marxist—a Trotskyite!—and eventually, horror of horrors, not a daughter at all. In some sense, Night Night Fawn resembles the trans literature we know—it’s structured around the central tragedy of a parent tormenting a child for their gender expression—but the primary object of Rosenberg’s attention here is the parent, not the child. Rosenberg retains the ethnographic lens common to so much trans fiction and memoir but turns it on Barbara, on both her Zionist and gender dogmatism. The Rosenberg family, like any other nuclear family, is supposed to transmit these most precious values from parent to child. Night Night Fawn attests to the many ways that this transmission can go badly wrong, and hints at something further—at the political and relational changes that become possible when a parent fails.

Rosenberg’s first novel, Confessions of the Fox, was published in 2018, in an era when trans literature was becoming newly fashionable, but even then his work didn’t entirely fit comfortably within the confessional tropes of the genre. A postmodern historical novel, Confessions of the Fox set its queer heroes loose in the archive—the story comes in the form of a long-lost manuscript written by the legendary 18th-century thief, folk hero, and escape artist Jack Sheppard (complete with footnotes)—but diverged from the historical record in claiming that Sheppard had also made an escape, heretofore undocumented, from a miserable girlhood. In its account of ungovernable perversion and DIY top surgery, Confessions rejected straight realism, imagining a past full of people figuring out extravagant ways to live beyond the gendered expectations placed on them.

Night Night Fawn has a different political project, a different setting and structure, but the underlying methodology is much the same. Like Confessions, it flirts with and then exceeds the archive: a novel that also resembles an unauthorized autobiography of Rosenberg’s own mother, complete with parallel names and parallel timelines. It lures the reader with an aura of fidelity and, as the novel progresses, goes totally off the rails.

Decades after that pivotal Exodus viewing, and after a brief and disappointing stint in Israel, Barbara gave up on the idea that her now-husband would ever become the man of her dreams. But she continued to harbor fantasies about what a stint doing community service for the IDF’s Logistics Corps could do for her daughter, that “golem of upside-down gender” Jordana, who has failed to live up to her namesake (a particularly fanatical girl soldier from Exodus). Israel would “take care of the gayness, the mannishness, the whole bit,” Barbara thought. “My daughter would come out of it cured and boyfriended.”

But the trip turned out to be a disaster. Barbara’s first-person narration gives way to excerpts of telegrams from Jordana’s uncle (the “Israel nut” supervising the trip), Jordana’s own journals, and a medical report. We learn that she left in the middle of the night for Ben-Gurion Airport. We also learn that, since then, Barbara hasn’t seen her child for a long time. And we learn that Jordana Rosenberg died in a motorcycle accident in 1988.

This comes as a surprise to the reader, because the book’s first few hundred pages are interpolated with dispatches from the present—entries in the apology letter that Barbara, now dying of cancer, is writing to “J-something? What am I supposed to call you?” as J. cares for her, with all that this entails: dragging her to the hospital, feeding her green shakes for breakfast, digging the remote out of the bedsheets.