BOOK REVIEW: Naomi Kanakia, The Default World

something else is alive in me

As promised, I will occasionally post brief reviews of new and forthcoming books sent to me in exchange for an honest response. The book reviewed below was released in May and is currently available for purchase. Please enjoy!

---

Naomi Kanakia, The Default World (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2024)

The Default World is the debut literary novel by Substack’s own Naomi Kanakia.¹ In a post announcing the book’s publication, she wrote, “If you like this Substack, you’ll like the book,” both because the third-person narrative voice resembles her essayistic one and because the novel conveys—it doesn’t argue or preach but through story and character conveys—her worldview:

This hard core of common sense—the feeling that it is possible to get to the bottom of things, and that underneath it all there does exist the truth.

Like her favorite novelists, Kanakia says she writes to “combin[e] rigorous honesty with a deep belief in humanity’s potential to be transcend its worst impulses.” Her list of favorite novelists, not coincidentally, is mostly a roll call of unsparing social realists and naturalists: Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, Emile Zola, Richard Yates, Henry James, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and more. I think, too, of another of her recent posts defending Richard Wright’s oft-disparaged Native Son for its ruthless depiction of rage and alienation in defiance of minoritarian demands for “positive representation.”

It would be more tasteless than rigorously honest to call The Default World the trans Native Son, especially since (I hope this doesn’t count as a spoiler) nobody gets brutally murdered. But its relentless mimesis of the protagonist’s interior life, narrated throughout in the close third person, exposes thoughts and feelings that readers of a more activist or moralist bent might prefer to have left unexposed, from masturbatory lust to homicidal anger to every shade and variant of gender dysphoria and the anxious self-scrutiny it provokes.² This is literature, not social uplift.

Plot-wise, The Default World is about an Indian-American trans woman named Jhanvi who attempts to infiltrate the fire-eaters, a group of wealthy white Burning-Man-type San Francisco tech workers. Her goal is to marry one of them—an old Stanford classmate in denial about his own queer tendencies—for his company’s health benefits so she can complete her medical transition. Scrupulously alert to every micro-climate of power in every social hierarchy, Kanakia hilariously sends up this company of polyamorous progressives with their sex dungeons, their orgies, their shared rent-controlled apartment (the “Fun Haus”), and their histrionic and therapeutic leftist pieties about equality and “care.”

Jhanvi’s keen outsider eye detects the primary difference between herself and the group. It’s not so much race and gender identity, though she frankly concedes if only to herself that she plays these cards to manipulate their progressive conscience. It’s not even exactly class but rather (if we can use this word in egalitarian America) pedigree. Jhanvi’s parents are engineers, whereas the group’s parents are doctors and lawyers. Meanwhile, the only member of the group Jhanvi can actually connect with is its only other member of color, the arrogant and downbeat Roshie. Then again, Roshie is also its only member with non-professional-managerial parents, descending, we are told, not even from engineers but from store owners.³

On the other hand, the realists Kanakia and Jhanvi are hardly going to deny that these beautiful people are beautiful. Their hypocritical hoarding of worldly goods from sex to money to healthcare is no reason for Jhanvi not to want these things for herself. The good things they hoard are good things. Jhanvi’s own realism on this score comes into conflict with the probably autistic femcel Roshie’s much more thorough and ultimately self-mortifying hatred of the crew to which she’s nevertheless resentfully attached herself. Either way, those not born to this class can’t afford to pretend they don’t need or want what this class has.

The titular phrase is the fire-eaters’ term for the normative bourgeois life of family and community they’re trying to transcend. Early in the novel, Jhanvi explains to Roshie that this “default” is the default for a reason, and that even those who wish to transgress the social code must do so in the knowledge of why it was devised in the first place:

“The default world is actually better at helping people than these guys. Like, the default world knows you can have excitement or security, but you can’t have both. People who help you out when you’re in trouble? That’s your real-world community. For me, that means my family, it means Indian people, it means trans people. But community comes with rules. Like, my parents helped me, but they were like, We don’t want to get ostracized by our relatives, so let’s keep your transition quiet. Other trans people helped me, but they were like, Here, abandon all ambition and work this shitty job because it’s the best you can hope for. If you take someone’s help, you give up your freedom. That’s the rule.”

This becomes the thematic question of the novel: is the “found family” casually celebrated in progressive and queer spaces really an adequate replacement for the thick and unchosen obligations of actual family and community? Kanakia poses this question with the greatest intensity not in dialogue but in a delirious and painful chapter at the novel’s center: Jhanvi’s found family semi-advertently leaves her out on the streets of San Francisco with nowhere else to go for a night. She has to survive on spite and determination, booze and blow jobs, calls home to family and imprecations shouted up at the Fun Haus.

Kanakia makes extensive use of free indirect discourse to immerse us in the perceptive and well-read but emotionally labile Jhanvi’s consciousness for the duration of the novel. She therefore blends a swift-moving vernacular style with allusions to everything from the Russian classics and canonical philosophy to Ayn Rand (here disguised as a fictional science-fiction author named Anna Laurent⁴ whose books both Jhanvi and Roshie guiltily admire).

This technique also allows Kanakia to explore every euphoric and dysphoric aspect of Jhanvi’s trans identity, such as, to give only one example, Jhanvi’s frank self-concession that she essentially took the incel-to-trans pipeline, and is better for having done it:

She’d stood at the outskirts of so many parties, her eyes burning in anger and shame, wondering why she was so gawky and different, so unable to speak—wondering why it was so easy for other people, folks no smarter or more handsome than herself. She’d hated so long and so deeply—hated everyone who’d ever let their eyes slip over her—and she’d vowed a thousand times that she’d take revenge by living well. She’d been an angry young man, and she could’ve slipped into the alt-right misogynerd rabbit hole, but instead she symbolically killed the man inside her.

If the novel ever goes beyond its realism—even its naturalism or materialism—the moment comes appropriately enough when Jhanvi trips on mushrooms at one of the fire-eaters’ orgies and perceives her primordial cosmic identity at the back of all mere social identities:

I understand now those bizarre people I’ve sometimes met in trans groups who think they’re fairies or demons or vampires. I’m inhuman, something else is alive in me. Jhanvi is a costume. Nikhil was a costume.

I appreciate such a hint of the metaphysical in a novel that otherwise pokes fun at its characters’ “spiritual but not religious” Californian pretensions.

Metaphysics aside, The Default World takes its place in the long tradition of the realist novel, which has always celebrated “adventurers” (Jhanvi’s wry self-identification) trying to make their way up in an ever-more-unstable modern world that threatens to dispossess newcomers and transgressors alike. In tribute to Jhanvi’s love of science fiction, I will quote for my conclusion SF writer Samuel R. Delany’s tribute in his About Writing to this realist tradition and its vision of modern secular human aspiration, a mandate The Default World compelling fulfills:

The way that Austen and George Sand and George Eliot and all three of the Brontës (not to mention Balzac, Thackeray, Stendhal, and Dickens) got their heroines over puberty and through adulthood was to allow them to know/learn of the material powers they lack that inform and constitute these girlhood desires. (It’s called growing up.) Sometimes after they grow up, like Maggie Tulliver, they Die in the End. Sometimes, like Dorothea Brooke, they marry unhappily but stick it out. Rarely, like Sand’s Laliá or Sade’s Juliette, they live alone to a ripe and joyous old age with the odd lover, male and/or female, off on the side; and sometimes, like Elizabeth Bennet, they Marry and Live Happily Ever After. But more important than the ending chosen for a given life, these writers allow their characters, during the duration of their portrayed lives, to work their butts off at whatever social level they have access to, to achieve that material power, whether that work—because of the pressures from the greater system—is finally a success or not.

[…]

The novel is a great, great form (to write the words—“I am a novelist; my life has been committed to it”—makes my eyes tear) because, as a form, it says that evil (like good) is a manifestation of social systems, not individuals, and thus individuals, both the good ones and the bad ones, if they move into new social systems they are unused to, can be changed by them if they stay there.⁵

Without spoiling the plot, I can also say that The Default World, for all its gritty and even sometimes cynical realism, nevertheless hints at the potential for both chosen and unchosen families to transcend their worst impulses and become habitable for both the good ones and the bad ones, even for the inhuman in us all.

1. She has previously published YA and has a forthcoming nonfiction work on the great books. I was introduced to her through bold, provocative essays like this and this.

2. In this respect, Nella Larsen’s less melodramatic and more interior Quicksand is the precursor The Default World most recalls rather than Native Son, especially since Larsen also mocks the Harlem Renaissance-era cultural activism of her own era.

3. Anyone who enjoys my own occasional expectorations of lower-middle-class contempt for what I have called the “gentry left” will revel in this element of the novel. I haven’t personally experienced the specific San Francisco tech milieu The Default World describes, except maybe at a few rather Burner-heavy parties in Uptown Minneapolis years ago, however.

4. Anna Laurent could also be read as an aptly gender-swapped Robert A. Heinlein, a right-wing libertarian SF novelist nonetheless admired by the left-wing libertarian SF novelist Samuel R. Delany—more from him in a moment in the main text—just as the progressives Jhanvi and Roshie admire Laurent, and (to use Delany’s allusion) just as Marx loved Balzac. The materialist leftist often applauds the conservative for telling it like it is—“it” being the social system—without all the liberal platitudes.

5. Delany makes this point against what he regards as the meretriciously unrealistic identitarian fiction of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, perhaps echoing Kanakia’s own disaffiliation in her announcement post from writers like Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange.