In one of many bars, Frankie Gold sings while Sammy Silver plays piano after a day job at the anarchist newspaper. The Butch Piano Players Union meets in the corner next to the jukebox. Laur smokes on the back steps, sweaty thigh to thigh with Vic. Frankie’s childhood sweetheart Lily turns up at yet another bar to see a second Sammy play every Friday night. And before all that, there’s always dinner at Marg’s. Fabulated out of oral histories, anthologies, as well as the fiction of the butch-femme bar scene and Yiddish anarchist tradition, Greasepaint is a rollicking whirlwind of music and politics—the currents of community embodied and held inside the bar.
Reviews
32 BOOKS WE’RE EXCITED ABOUT IN 2024
“a joyously eccentric portrait of a community of lesbian musicians in fifties NYC, often told in long stretches of quickfire conversation.”
In Greasepaint (Nightboat Books), Hannah Levene’s debut novel, sentences unfold like songs and intellectual rapport becomes a process of collective music-making. Immersed in the bars of 1950s New York, the novel follows the cadences of a cast of butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists as they perform, debate, flirt, and organize. . . On dancefloors and in delis, at meetings of the Butch Piano Players Union and over dinner, the characters improvise their way toward one another (or toward the revolution, or at least toward another Friday night).
“Greasepaint occupies an imperfect and embodied anarchist politics as it might exist outside of academic institutions… It’s scrappy, brassy, hazy, but in the chaos and uncertainty, seeds of hope twitch and squirm in the form of love, friendships and imagined futures as we sit and wait for the revolution, for “the pot to overflow”. It’s a reminder that fantasies and pipe-dreams serve a purpose in political struggle, as does music and dancing with your friends.”
“While smoking together outside on the bar’s back doorsteps, the friends discuss community, sex, desire, masculinity, their broken homophobic families, and the longing for a loving relationship… This heartfelt ode to 1950s lesbian social culture is worth a look.”
Hannah Levene’s debut is fresh, experimental, unique and exhilarating. Come for the anarchist butch lesbians, stay for the 1950s swag, the smoky bar conversation and the jukebox when the band’s not playing. I didn’t read this book, it read me.
“Butchness is also about transcending the body on some level, redefining as the individual sees fit for their own gender presentation and performance. Turning the relentless awareness of one’s own body into a tool rather than a hindrance… It’s exciting to experience such a frank, queer gaze on the page—that which is interested in affirming the individual rather than defining it.”
The prose hums and sings, running on the juice of an endless succession of similes. Words don’t resolve, don’t make definite. They are provisional, shifting, a piano riff; they offer a blush of pleasure, a spot for two humans to meet and understand something, even as they know the spot is not perfect, never will be. Levene’s characters flirt, make each other laugh, and it’s in the semantic collisions that happen inside words that the novel cozies up with its larger questions.
Greasepaint is a book about how one manages to build a life in spite of marginalization and threatened violence. Because—on we go. Levene’s shambling, butch, melodic prose wears its melancholy and tenderness and resignation and humor lightly. Her characters envision a just world.
-Agnes Borinsky, The Anarchist Review of Books
