Liz Harmer Reviews Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez
Crosshairs. Catherine Hernandez. HarperAvenue. $22.99, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-1-443459-72-3
Something strange is happening to dystopian literature. When Trump was elected, there was a run on novels predicting authoritarianism. 1984 became a bestseller again, and everyone was talking about Sinclair Lewis’s social novel of fascist rise It Can’t Happen Here. We didn’t understand tyranny, and now we needed to, and so we turned to novels. The Handmaid’s Tale, our old Canadian political dystopian standby, also became a bestseller again, but soon its Hulu adaptation became too hard for me to watch. This horrific fantasy of women being separated from their children was in reality playing out at the US-Mexico border. Is still playing out. An episode in which a character was endeared to the viewers and then lynched was the episode during which I stopped being able to watch it.
In her second novel, Crosshairs, Catherine Hernandez pushes into and blurs this overlap of real-world and near-futurist traumas. Riskily, Hernandez asks the reader not to get too caught up in the dream of the novel or to leave our worldly concerns behind. There are three different prefatory remarks warning us of what’s to come: a trigger warning, a dedication in verse to the 49 clubgoers killed at Pulse nightclub, and then a remark directed at the reader of privilege. “You will,” Hernandez writes,
survive your discomfort while reading this book.
But many like me,
who sit dangerously at various intersections of identity,
will not survive long enough for you to complete the last page.
What will you do?
These three remarks are important: they set up that the novel is meant to be instructive, that it is not separate from our nonfictional lives, and that it will be uncomfortable to read, perhaps more for some than for others. In each, the novel keeps its promise.
Crosshairs opens in an often-flooded basement in Toronto where our narrator Kay has been hiding for several seasons, long enough to have “watched a raccoon give birth” through the window and then to watch its kits “grow too large for the cubby hole.” Kay, a “Queer, femme, Jamaican-Filipino man,” addresses his story to Evan, whom he loves and hopes is in hiding elsewhere, but doesn’t have the luxury even of something to write on or with. “Anne Frank,” he quips, “minus the diary.” We learn that Canada has come under the leadership of a fascist government in cahoots with fascist corporations that, after a series of climate-related disasters, have implemented what they call the “Renovation,” a euphemism for a horrific program of systematically sterilizing, killing, and enslaving in workhouses anyone who isn’t white, abled, straight- and cis-passing. Just as the Nazis copied genocidal strategies from the early settlers, the methods of the Renovators are not new. Black, Brown, disabled, and LGBTQ2S people — people the novel calls Others — are slowly but then all of a sudden completely unable to live in Canadian society. No bank accounts, no jobs, no housing, no phones. The horrors are so shocking even to Kay that many times he refuses to believe what is happening until he sees it himself.
Hernandez cleverly lets this unfold by having Kay tell the stories of each of the other major characters as he encounters them: Liv, a queer white ally and key figure in the Resistance; Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee also in hiding; Firuzeh, a social worker escaping from the work camps, and Beck, a queer white man and former member of the Armed Forces who has converted to the cause of allyship. Through these stories, we get a complete picture that culminates without leaving us in despair. Using the best tricks of storytelling, Hernandez gives us the whole world — its past, its present, and what we hope will be its future.
There is a great deal of trauma in Crosshairs, but there is abundance, too, and warmth. The pleasure Kay feels putting on the makeup and clothing for his pre-Renovation drag shows and his sweet romance with Evan are a testament to Queer love, community, and joy. Hernandez does not always indulge her impulse to lyricism, but when she does so, the effect is striking. Moments of beauty and poetry are respites. Describing a bonfire, Kay remarks that Beck “uses bunched-up newspaper at the base, their unhappy headlines going up in flames and ascending into a smoky memory above the trees.”
But mostly, the novel does not relent. As I read Crosshairs and as I write this review, I am all too aware of how close such a terrible future feels. The West Coast is on fire and my eyes are stinging from smoke. We are in the middle of a pandemic, racist rhetoric is surging, ICE is sterilizing detainees, a Canadian far-right is rising, and American fascism has arrived. Americans of a certain ilk like to joke about moving to Canada, and it is sobering to remember that it can happen here. It has happened here.
Hernandez takes an aesthetic risk by being so overtly didactic, and there were moments that I wanted more subtlety from the prose. Not because I wanted to feel less potently Hernandez’s points, but because I wanted to feel them more deeply. The reason that there is a danger in didactic literature is not because we don’t want literature to teach us — we clearly do — but, like little children, we don’t always want to know we’re being taught or to see the apparatus of our instruction. The allies, here, are trying too hard to be correct. The villains, with hardly an exception, are sociopathic. If the characters had had a bit more ambivalence, this would have inserted some suspenseful uncertainty. Still, in the end, Crosshairs powerfully shows the ways that structural and casual racism and transphobia aren’t that far removed from genocidal catastrophes; it provides a mirror that many Canadians will not want to look in. The privileged reader, Hernandez reminds us, needs to figure out what they’re going to do about that.
Liz Harmer is a Hamilton writer living in California. Her first novel, The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, was released with Knopf Canada in 2019. Her stories, essays, and poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Walrus, Image Journal, the Globe and Mail, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, PRISM, Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere. She has also been a finalist for the Journey Prize, and nominated four times for National Magazine Awards, one of which she won in 2014 for Personal Journalism. Her second novel, Strange Loops, is coming soon.