So the hype on this American classic novel is all about the immigrant experience, Ellis Island, the lower East side of New York City at the turn of the century. But I found all of these elements mere setting and felt that they have little to do with what makes this a really great novel. To me, this is first and foremost a novel from the point of view of a just pre-pubescent child, already torn apart by the performative aspects of gender difference--that is to say his father's manly violence and his mother's overweening female protectiveness--resisting his introduction into the biological reality behind gender roles--genitalia itself and sex acts--that his slightly older peers would force upon him.

The drama is both psychic and physical as the child voyeristically observes his parents and their roles as male and female (and also overhears his mother recounting an illicit love affair of hers preceding her marriage), and is pressured by a slightly older girl into petting, and, climatically, into assisting a male friend in the seduction of a cousin. The conflict lies in the child's resistance to confronting the genitalia and acts supposedly behind the gender roles that seem, to him, so charged with violence and danger--to both the over-aggressive male and the seemingly passive female, who could at any moment become a victim, shamed and dishonored by her own sexual desire.

This is, to me, a fascinating story because it illuminated the pity I feel for the political conservative and their pitiful desire to constantly police the performative aspects of gender. Conservatives have always clung to gender norms, clothing, restroom segregation, hairstyles, and, of course, traditional patriarchal power and workplace norms that keep men in control. These are obvious aspects of traditional culture to which we'd expect the religious and conservative to adhere. What's so pitiful about it, is their reluctance, because of taboo, to confront the only place where gender is real and "biological" as they always say, when we are naked and in sexual acts. Thus the poor conservative seeks to police the theater surrounding gender without ever referring to the biological fact of gender that they claim they support since, because of taboo, for them it cannot actual exist and always remains just outside of what can be seen or even spoken of in their world.

The struggle to understand gender roles without confronting genitals or sexuality is real, and a constant conservative bugaboo, and this novel does a fabulous job of representing these forces at work in a child's mind. What also makes it a great novel, is how the form reiterates the conflict. While the narrative begins in a kind of classic realist style, the prose gets more and more impressionistic, and even experimental the more pitched the struggle within the child's mind grows. This is a really fabulous technique, perfectly aesthetically pleasing as the prose mirrors the drama and draws us further into the inner struggle and outer actions.

Like all struggles with this kind of culture over taboo in the conservative mind, the drama eventually leads to mere chastity (as in the Catholic church), or an act of self mutilation (see: St. Origen and other related stories), or some other gesture in death's direction in an attempt to erase the realities of human breeding, like a concentration camps or a murder spree scapegoating women. While leftist politics, through revolution, have provoked a fair amount of death, I think that the conservative side, fascism, can only be a kind of death cult since it can never admit to the basic biological facts of human genitalia or the act of procreation, so caught up as it is in upholding the power structures and ritualistic theatrics of the past.