So...The Lilac People was not my cup of tea.

This is fiction that desperately wants to be nonfiction (the author's note in the back calls it "my armchair historian novel"); in fact I would say it is primarily a vehicle for delivering information about a particular historical incident, steamrolling little considerations like "character development" and "well-crafted prose" in service of shoveling that factual information into your brain. The story, such as it is, is constantly being interrupted with passages that could be transplanted directly into a nonfiction account with zero edits. Every time someone gives (or takes) an educational tour, so does the reader; the informational material is presented as direct quotations rather than mediated through the characters' experience in any way.

Even so, it struggles to get some of those facts right. Some of the time this has been done deliberately; as Todd explains in the author's note, rather than take the opportunity to educate readers about some aspects of queer history that now feel obscure or even uncomfortable to some, he has made a choice to translate certain terminology in a way that (he feels) favors modern understanding, even though it's in direct opposition to how the people in question would have spoken about themselves. And his reasoning for forgoing the more-correct translation of "lavender" in favor of "lilac" just felt odd — because people might associate "lavender" with lesbians by way of the Lavender Menace movement? This is a color long connected with queer identity of many kinds — must we really collaborate in the splintering of our own community? Should we rename the Lavender Scare as well? Or might we be able to take a step back and look at the bigger picture about how our struggles and our successes are intrinsically linked?

Another problem arises in Todd's representation of now-outdated queer concepts. His characters are incessantly, and cleanly, divided into two groups: the transvestites (which a big wagging no-no finger warns in the introductory author's note is absolutely inappropriate language to use today — somebody better go let everyone still self-IDing this way know), and the inverts. While Todd discusses some of his choices around "transvestism" terminology in the author's note, he has nothing at all to add about "inversion" — leading this reader to guess that he simply felt it was self-explanatory: it's used throughout the novel as a 1:1 equivalent to "gay" or "homosexual." However, the reality was a little more complicated than that! Although today we generally view sexual attraction and gender identity as two different conversations, sexual inversion theory did not make such a distinction. For example, in this theory, a man attracted to other men was embodying the social role of a woman (attraction to men); he wasn't gay, he was actually a latent heterosexual — he possessed the personality of a woman in the body of a man. He was inverted. At numerous points in the text Todd displays a complete lack of understanding of this now-discarded theory: his characters puzzle over how Nazis could possibly see someone simultaneously as a woman and as a "male invert," and words are inserted into the mouth of the famed Dr. Hirschfeld suggesting that he too shared our 21st-century views. I had a real problem with this; for all the research he's apparently done, Todd is quick to judge some outmoded queer ideas, and completely incurious about others, yet acts as though he is capable of adequately representing them. But superimposing the present over the past like this neither does the past justice nor respects readers' spirit of inquiry or capacity for critical thought.

I realize this book is a hot commodity right now, and I'm so sorry to say I don't believe it lives up to the hype. My guess is that a not-insignificant portion of the emotion The Lilac People is raising in people is due more to the tragic nature of the historical events portrayed (especially as many may be learning about these events for the first time), and their frightening parallels to events happening now, than to the novel itself as a piece of writing. I believe that in this moment, we need and deserve meticulously-researched, well-written NONFICTION about this history. (I am hopeful that the recent biography of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld [The Einstein of Sex, by Daniel Brook] can help to begin filling this gap in our collective cultural knowledge.) For those readers seeking fiction that offers a better window into how queer people of the past might have thought of themselves, I would recommend The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall — a primary source from the time period in question.