Literature / Idlewild (2023)

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Idlewild is a queer Coming of Age Story and the debut novel by James Frankie Thomas.

The year is 2002. The place is Idlewild, an artsy, Quaker private school in downtown Manhattan, where people are still living in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks. Nell Rifkin is a shy girl obsessed with Fay Vasquez-Rabinowitz, her eventual best friend, who in turn is aloof, pretentious, and obsessed with gay men. The two of them bond over hunting for gay subtext, Slash Fic written over AIM, and high school theater, and become inseparable. But after they grow closer to Theo Severyn and Christopher Korkian, a pair of Ambiguously Gay boys with a bizarre mirror of their relationship, Fay and Nell's dynamic starts to change, until one day things transform forever.

Not to be confused with the the 1995 novel of the same name by Mark Lawson, the 2003 science fiction novel by Nick Sagan, or the 2006 musical film (starring the members of OutKast).

Idlewild provides examples of the following:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: The book was published in 2023, and set in 2001-2003.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Nell is in love with Fay, Fay is in love with the idea of Theo and Christopher being gay for each other, Christopher loves Theo, Theo loves Fay, but none of them can ever get together due to incompatible orientations. There's also a platonic version of this at play: Nell wishes to become friends with Bottom but can't, while Eddie Applebaum feels similarly about Nell. Overall, it's a cast full of characters failing to connect with each other.
• Ambiguously Gay: Theo Severyn's sexuality is never clarified, even at the end. He's knowledgeable about gay culture and happy to allow people to believe there's something going on between him and Christopher, but he never comes out as gay or admits feelings for Christopher, and may be going along with the whole thing a) in order to cultivate Fay's interest and b) because he's obsessed with the power fantasy of being the Marble Faun. He's also attracted to Fay, but sees her (correctly) as a pervy gay man in a woman's body, so that raises more questions than answers about his sexuality.
• Bathos: In the opening scene of the novel, a smarmy speech about 9/11 during the school's prayer session is interrupted by an extremely loud fart.
• The Bear: Eddie Appelbaum becomes one as an adult, a bearded gay man who's big and chubby.
• Best Friend: Nell and Fay. They spend nearly all their time together, are close as can be, and even called themselves "the F&N unit".
• Boyish Short Hair: Nell and Fay both have matching short haircuts while they're friends at school. For Nell, this can indicate she's a lesbian. Fay's may be taken as Foreshadowing that she's a closeted trans man.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Fay is well read and constantly spouting pretentious intellectual opinions about media, and got a perfect score on the SAT reading section. But she seldom pays attention in class, rarely does her homework, and fails to get into a single college and flunks out of Idlewild close to graduation, eventually working at a video store for years.
• Butch Lesbian: Nell is described as such by other characters. She's been out as a lesbian since 14, the only openly gay person at Idlewild, wears mostly T shirts and jeans, and eventually gets a short men's haircut. As an adult, she works as a nurse, not the most masculine of professions.
• But Not Too Foreign: Fay is half Jewish and half Latino. So far as we see, she's the only student of Latino descent at Idlewild (many others are Jewish). It doesn't ever affect her character in the book, and is only noticeable due to her last name Vasquez-Rabinowitz.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Fay has very large breasts, and generally doesn't wear bras. This is one of the main things students at Idlewild find appealing in Fay, and Nell (a lesbian) often notices. Years after leaving the school, Fay runs into Theo and Christopher, who immediately notice her breasts are not visible (given she's wearing a binder). Fay snarks that this is all they remember her for.
• Climbing Climax: The climax of the book, and the moment that ends Fay and Nell's friendship, takes place at the cast party on the roof of a 6th floor apartment. Nell and Fay in turn race up the stairs to find each other, then Nell dramatically races up a shaky ladder to an even taller building to save Fay from jumping or being pushed off.
• Contrived Coincidence: Fay ended up buying the ticket for On the Town that Nell sold without either of them knowing it.
• Conversational Troping: Fay is obsessed with literary analysis and how tropes play out in fiction, disdaining some works as cliche. She's fascinated with the Depraved Homosexual trope and discusses several popular examples such as in Othello, Rope, and The Celluloid Closet. She and Nell are also obsessed with Ho Yay, using the term by name.
• Cool Teacher: As a student-centered, progressive hippie school, Idlewild strives for all the teachers to be this, though the actual results are variable. Students call their teachers by their first names, grades aren't given, and teachers are encouraged to inculcate a love of learning. Wanda "The Witch" is a widely beloved (except by Fay and Nell) drama teacher who takes students out to the opera and even comes over to their houses.
• Depraved Bisexual: The question of the violent, chaotic, controlling Theo Severyn's sexuality is never clarified in the story - he's fine kissing Christopher and toying with his emotions and seems to know a fair bit about gay culture, but never commits wholeheartedly to it and also expresses interest in Fay, though it's unclear if he sees her as a boy or a girl. Theo's sexual ambiguity ultimately stems from his manipulativeness and desire for attention - he's a constant source of chaos and sees everyone else as dolls to be manipulated, and emulates the Marble Faun character (becoming more visibly gay) because of his admiration for the power he holds.
• Depraved Homosexual: Invoked. Fay is obsessed with the trope and many of the fictional examples; she's constant talking about menacing, twisted fictional gay men. She's insistent that Iago from Othello's villainous motivation is that he's gay for Othello.
• The Dividual: Nell and Fay were a Syndividual type. They were very close, with different traits but in a symbiotic Pseudo-Romantic Friendship while in school together. Nell even says that she lost track then of where she ended and Fay began. They even called themselves "the F&N unit".
• Driven to Suicide: At the cast party Fay fantasizes about falling off the roof and making it look like an accident, crushed by the publication of the Faunfic, the public reveal of the fanfic about her and Nell, and the rapid deterioration of her relationship with Nell. Theo instead offers to take her to an even taller building, where she, perhaps with consent, nearly gets pushed off.
• False Confession: Fay claims falsely that she called in the bomb threat to Idlewild near the end of the book, resulting in her expulsion before graduating.
• Female Gaze: There are a number of scenes narrated from Nell's point of view describing Fay's body, breasts and butt in detail, conveying Nell's erotic desire. They contrast highly with the detached, somewhat disgusted way Fay describes Nell and most other people's appearance, highlighting the difference in orientation between the two.
• Fired Teacher: Wanda the Witch gets fired from Idlewild after adding a scene to the school play that forced the school's only Black student to play a slave and be whipped onstage by his classmates. Juniper and Daylily, her favorite students, are outraged and stage a revolt, but Fay and Nell are thrilled because this means they have better chances of getting good roles in the spring musical.
• Friendless Background:
  • Nell had no friends for her first two years of high school, until she got close to Fay.
  • Fay had no friends until Nell for years, period.
• Girl-on-Girl is Hot: Perverted IT specialist Jimmy Frye certainly thinks so, and blackmails Fay into describing her (fictional) sexcapades with Nell to him in detail.
• Glamorous Single Mother: Nell's mother Nancy is a single mother by choice, with her having gotten conceived by sperm donation. She's got a well-paid job and they live a comfortable middle class life, while Nell's grandparents help her out financially too.
• Guy on Guy Is Hot: Fay definitely thinks so - she watches gay porn, writes Slash Fic (and gets off to it), and is erotically obsessed with the idea of two men sleeping together. When Theo and Christopher finally make out, they say it's for Fay and Nell's benefit. Played with, however, as it eventually becomes clear Fay's obsession is at least as much about her unrecognized desire to transition as it is about her fetishes.
• Hairy Girl: Nell and Fay both are unconcerned with conventions, so they sport matching thick underarm hair. The former is a lesbian, while the latter's a closeted trans man.
• Hippie Teacher: Deva the Dove, a gentle punk-styled English teacher who's a total pushover who completely fails to control her class.
• Incompatible Orientation: Nell has an obsessive crush on Fay, but Fay isn't interested in women at all. Fay nevertheless indulges Nell's crush because she is obsessed with gayness as a concept and likes the attention.
• Irony: Fay, who couldn't get into any colleges nor even graduate in high school, later gets work helping rich kids get into college through coaching and ghostwriting their application essays. She is well aware of the irony.
• Late Coming Out: It's implied near the end of the book that Fay eventually starts to come to terms with being a gay trans man only in her 30's, though she ends the book still in the beginning stages of transitioning.
• Lesbian Jock: Nell’s first girlfriend Kiley was one, a muscular athlete who'd played on their college's row boat crew team.
• LGBT Awakening: While signs of Fay being a gay trans man are fairly obvious but unspoken when she was in high school, she never acknowledged these desires as anything other than a fetish until more than 10 years later, when she ended up tutoring a gay teenage trans boy. While this upsets her so much that she quickly drops the client, she starts wearing a binder after that and slowly starts to acknowledge her desire to become a gay man.
• Malicious Misnaming: Fay and Nell come up with alternative nicknames for girls they don't like: Lily Day-Jones becomes Daylily, while Jennifer Green becomes Juniper Green.
• Manchild: In her 30's, Fay never gets a "real career" despite her wealthy background and is still single, making a living tutoring high school students and seemingly has never moved on from high school, continually obsessing about the events that transpired (in contrast to Nell, who while still deeply affected prefers not to think about it). Theo even remarks that she looks exactly the same as she did in high school. This inability to grow up is implied to stem from the fact that she literally never became a man - and needs to transition in order to move past her stunted growth.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Fay is a homophone of fey, referring to an effete, chaotic, or androgynous gay man - exactly what she strives to be.
  • Theo Severyn's surname may be a reference to Severin, the protagonist of Venus in Furs, befitting his sadistic nature (though the character he's named after takes the opposite role).
• Messy Hair: Fay's curly hair is perpetually unruly as she doesn't really care about her appearance, and it highlights her unconventional nature.
• Minor Living Alone: Downplayed with Theo as he doesn't literally live alone, but his living arrangements are akin to a permanent sleepover with his friend Christopher, giving him a similar air. His father is not in the picture and his mother abandoned him seemingly for good reason after he hit her, causing her to crash her car.
• Mistaken for Gay: Nell wrongly believes Fay's dad is gay as he lives with an openly gay roommate after divorcing her mom. It turns out that the two are friends only.
• New Transfer Student: Christopher was a temporary refugee from Stuyvesant after his school was damaged by the 9/11 attacks, but then partway through the year he decided to transfer to Idlewild for good.
• Nice Guy: Bottom is kind and polite to everyone. Among the Idlewild students, he's the one who comes off as the best.
• The Nicknamer: Nell and Fay like to give most classmates and teachers of theirs nicknames. They also nickname themselves as well, going by "the F&N unit".
• Older Than They Look: Fay, in her early 30s, still looks like she did as a teenager, and is often told this.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Nell and Fay only think of many characters using the nicknames for them they invented. Bottom's name is really Peter Baptiste, for instance.
• Political Correctness Is Evil: Inverted. Daylily and Juniper Green instigate a riot to reinstate their favorite teacher (Wanda the Witch) who they paint as an innocent victim of political correctness. Wanda was fired for putting what Nell, Bottom, and the narrative see as a pretty racist scene into the school play, but much of the school sees as a grave injustice.
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Fay and Nell are very close friends. They almost constantly hang out, are at each other's houses really often, talk on the phone late into the night and write fan fiction jointly. It's revealed many other people believe they're a couple because Nell is a lesbian, though this is not true (Fay only likes men). Nell descibes them as so close she lost track of where she ended and Fay began for a long time.
• Queer Establishing Moment: Fay walks in once on Juniper and Daylily while the two girls are making out in a room at a party, with them not noticing her. She hadn't known before the two liked girls (or each other that way).
• Quirky Curls: Fay has thick, curly dark hair and is a bold, confident person who bucks convention and inspires Nell to do the same.
• Race Fetish: Jimmy Frye only likes Asian women, which he tells Nell and Fay repeatedly, acting like it's his sexual orientation. Both find this slightly disgusting, though they tolerate him as he's useful to them for his IT skills.
• Real-Person Fic: The Marble Faun, Fay and Nell's ongoing, multi-chapter Slash Fic about their real-life classmates Theo and Christopher hooking up. This eventually creates drama when it transpires that Fay posted it online and it gets found out by Theo and Christopher, who proceed to write a similar fic about Fay and Nell.
• School Play: All the major characters star together in the Idlewild production of Othello, which, despite the pretentious aspirations of many of the cast, has the typical issues with forgotten lines, bizarre and unconvincing performances, and costumes that don't quite fit the chosen antibellum setting.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Nell works with veterans while an adult at the VA as a nurse. Many are suicidal, and she lost several patients that way. Female veterans have PTSD doubly from being sexual assaulted as well while in the armed forces (Nell's never met any exceptions).
• Shout-Out: Nell and Fay are both Genre Savvy media consumers who spend a lot of their free time discussing literature and film and other fandom activities. As such they discuss a number of works in story.
  • Nell is a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and But I'm a Cheerleader.
  • Fay is a big fan of The Celluloid Closet, Rope, and Psycho, among others.
• Shrinking Violet: Nell is very shy - she went the whole first two years of high school with no friends, and despite her obsessive crush on Fay was too terrified to ever talk to her for a whole year. Eventually she and Fay become friends, but Fay dominates the friendship and takes over Nell's whole identity. There are many moments when Nell has something important to say, but fails to stand up to Fay or make her thoughts known, with negative repercussions. She also repeatedly ignores or fails to follow up on overtures from her classmates to become her friend.
• The Show Must Go Wrong: The school's production of On the Town is wracked with problems, due to Theo's constant disruptions and Ms. Spider's inability to manage the students. The actual show is a disaster, with Bottom dropping out at the last minute due to laryngitis, a late start and poor audience attendance due to an antiwar protest happening at the same time, the students mangling the ensemble dance numbers, and someone turning on the house lights during the performance.
• Sissy Villain: Fay attempts to play Iago as a mincing Camp Gay with a fey scarf, but struggles to come off as convincing due to her female body.
• The Slacker: Fay is a loudmouth goofball who rarely does her homework or pays attention in class unless there's a way to spin assignments to be about gay men. She dresses in the typical slacker uniform of loose flannels and unkempt hair, and eventually gets the archetypical slacker job of a video store clerk.
• The Sociopath: Theo Severyn is charming but violent, manipulative, and seemingly emotionless. He has Christopher, Fay, and some of the teachers wrapped around his finger, orchestrates a riot during Morning Meeting, and calls in a bomb threat just to get out of class. He's also sadistic towards Fay and others. He tells Fay he sees the world as a dollhouse, and all the people around him as dolls to be played with and manipulated.
• Stalker with a Crush: Nell starts off this way to Fay, following her around, hacking into her student computer, and maintaining an obsessive blog of her activities.
• Stylistic Suck: Certain chapters are written as excerpts from The Marble Faun and are full of stilted dialog and cheesy cliches fitting for a fanfic.
• Switching P.O.V.: The chapters alternate between Nell and Fay's perspectives, along with both too under the label of "the F&N unit".
• Take My Hand!: The first edition cover art features two hands reaching, but not quite grasping each other, symbolizing the unrequited love and missed connections that run throughout the story.
• There Is Only One Bed: In The Marble Faun stories, Theo and Christopher are forced to share a bed due to Theo being displaced by the 9/11 attacks, so naturally they're aching with sexual tension for each other and end up getting handsy.
• Token Minority: Idlewild has mostly white students. Bottom is black, while Juniper's biracial with white and East Asian parents. They're the only minority supporting characters who get much focus.
• Tormented Teacher: Glen, the 23 year old teacher who aims to be an Enthusiastic Newbie Teacher but is taken seriously by none of the students and constantly mocked and subjected to humiliating nicknames.
• Trans Tribulations: While playing Iago, Fay becomes intensely aware and upset about her feminine body features, including her curves and her voice. She takes to speaking in a bizarre, deep rasp that fries her voice to the point that choir teacher Ms. Spider has to pull her aside and knock it out. It's implied that Fay's emotional disconnect, lack of ambition, death drive, and failure to find relationships all stem from her repressed need to transition, which she's sublimating into an unhealthy obsession with gay men. These repressed desires drive a series of bad decisions that ultimately drive a rift between her and her best friend Nell, and come to a boiling point towards the end of the book when they become irrepressible.
• Trauma Button: Theo survived 9/11, and around a year later he freaks out from a low-flying plane, nearly getting killed again by running into traffic to get away.
• Twofer Token Minority: Fay Rabinowitz-Vasquez is half-Latino, while also a gay trans man. She's the only minority main character.
• Unkempt Beauty: Fay doesn't really care about her appearance and has pretty messy hair. Nevertheless, she's attractive to other people, including Nell, who has a crush on her.
• Wild Teen Party: Juniper's cast party takes place while her parents are out of town at an ethnomusicology conference and involves plenty of alcohol provided by an inappropriately older boyfriend, attempts at drugs, and plenty of drama - including two girls hooking up in a bedroom, a fistfight, and multiple people nearly falling off the roof.