For almost four years now, I have been thinking deeply about the function and purpose of literary reviews. So long, and so hard, I fear my “eyes will stay that way,” as my mother used to say when I crossed them in fun. I’ve just finished a long academic article tracking the contemporary ideological manifestations of the Canadian poetry review. Thus when I reread Casey Plett’s Little Fish last week, with the intention of saying something interesting about the role of medicine in the book, underlining every instance of hormone, surgery, and encounter in healthcare spaces, I kept thinking: there’s a journal article here, sure, but what’s really exciting about this book is time, a point other reviewers of Plett’s novel have been noticing. For example, Jade Colbert in the Globe and Mail argues that “Little Fish is not looking backward. It's about [the protagonist] making some choices so she can imagine herself at 60. Not about trans pasts, but trans futurity.” And Evelyn Deshane writes in Plenitude Magazine that Plett reconfigures “the notion of time-as-biological” by having the protagonist “discuss how trans people age differently due to a new regime of hormones.” Deshane adds that the trans characters “also reconfigure time-as-autobiography by counting their age as when they first came out as trans, rather than birth.”
The reviews I read were insightful, most of them covering – for lack of a better term – what I will later unpack as the “zero chronology.” Yet the relative brevity of the reviews in conjunction with an overall cultural reticence to really dig into the formal manifestations of any literary text in the review genre, including Plett’s, made me wonder if the most useful thing I could contribute in this HA&L issue on MennoLit is not an argument about the harms the institution of medicine visits upon trans women1, but rather a quirky narration of my obsessive underlining practice from a week ago. Set to underline every biomedical scene in the text, I quickly added any appearance of “time” that seemed intentional.
