Love/Aggression: a review

When is home not home? When you do not belong there. Or when you cannot, or are forbidden to. The same might be said of our bodies and our identities.

June Martin’s madcap novel Love/Aggression (tRaum Books, 2023) is such a sugar-rush of situational absurdity, wicked satire, hallucinatory imagery, and maximally burlesque characters that it can be easy to overlook just how meticulously marshalled and deployed its symbols and images are. The novel ultimately forms itself into a prismatic rumination on the bodies which house us and the homes we seek, even as it keeps us merrily entertained along the way.

This is a tale of a long, messy breakup. Trans women Lily and Zoe are friends, not lovers, but their split grows as acrimonious as any fling-the-crockery divorce. When they first became housemates, “they were two halves of the same mind” whose “difference in perspective had been only the amount necessary to see in three dimensions”, but their bond begins to crack as certain personal shortcomings of Lily’s rub up against Zoe’s addiction-forming brushes with onscreen stardom. From there, everything goes bonkers.

As Zoe launches a campaign of harassment, going to absurd and sadistic lengths to force Lily to move out of the house they share, we also encounter a dominatrix who leads a religious cult and mounts her furniture on the wall… a master tattoo…