Originally published on 6/28/22 in the New York Times Book Review.
The letter X is the shiftiest minx in the alphabet: a treasure, a cipher, the person we once loved; a porno, a warning, the gender marker beyond F or M; and, now, the title of a queer, near-future noir by Davey Davis.
In “X” (the novel), X (the character) is a little of all these things, a “femdom nightmare” and the object of obsession for Davis’s nonbinary narrator (who spends most of the novel nameless).
After an intense sadomasochistic one-night stand at a Brooklyn warehouse party, the narrator fixates on X as a distraction — or perhaps a chance at salvation — as the world slips ever further into fascism. A mysterious government agency is encouraging undesirables to “export,” or voluntarily leave the country. First, they went after “nonwhite immigrants, those on the no-fly list, known commies and antifa, Jews and Muslims, Black and brown leftist organizers”; now they’re chasing down “drug users, sex changers and lots and lots of poor people.” X has been served her export papers, and the narrator has one month (at most) to find her. The hunt serves as a distraction from the narrator’s bleak daily life: a dead-end job they hate, a recent ex-girlfriend they can’t forget and a looming certainty that they, like all their friends, will be forced to export soon. As the clock ticks down, these realities bleed deeper into the story, no matter how much the narrator tries to ignore them…