Introduction to In Transit

By Katherine Packert Burke

[from the introduction to the 2026 Dalkey Archive Essentials edition]

1) I first became aware of Brigid Brophy because of In Transit. I also knew that Brophy had carried on a long affair with Iris Murdoch—meeting, I would learn, because Murdoch’s debut, Under the Net, placed second in the Cheltenham Literature Festival, behind Brophy’s debut, Hackenfeller’s Ape. “I adore the texture of your mind,” Murdoch wrote Brophy some years later. “You are a writer and a thinker and beautiful.” Maybe this is too luxuriously beside the point, but I will never stop telling everyone I meet about various lesbian pairings and I’m taking this opportunity, at the top, to tell you now.

2) I knew approximately two things about In Transit before I finally read it, perhaps the same two that you know: it is about someone of ambiguous gender who is, second, waiting in an airport.

3) “What you happen to call the world turned upside down is simply the world to someone who happened to be born on the other side,” reflects Evelyn Hilary “Pat” O’Rooley, the somebody-of-ambiguous gender who narrates the novel.

4) I used to think about my own gender a lot.

5) The thing you have to understand is that our language is already broken. There are holes no too-cute neologism is going to fix. Have you ever personally called someone an “unt” (a debinaried portmanteau, if we strain the definition, of “uncle” and “aunt”)? How about “niephling”? Or even—god forbid—“joyfriend”?

6) Somebody of ambiguous gender but not, crucially, like the ungendered narrator of Winterson’s Written on the Body or the elusive A*** of Garreta’s The Sphinx—two parallels we might be tempted to draw. Pat O’Rooley is unique, so far as I know, in the corpus of genderless narrators in that they are not withholding about their gender; they are as equally clueless about it as we are.

7) “They’re sly, though, these romance languages,” says Pat O’Rooley, “in the matter of sex ... they’re sexsessive, too, the languages: but unsophisticatedly. I shed them in sheer impatience at the infantility of their sexual curiosity. I do not want to be told the sex of inanimate objects. I don’t believe in it, for one thing.”

8) Brophy’s text is a profusion of puns, words split into both/and pairs, hurrying as it’s harrying and uppercutting as it undercuts you—yes, you, brought in in interludes by direct address. The text diverts into a libretto (where all the men are sung by women and vice versa) and splits off into two-columned simultaneous action.

9) O’Rooley “[takes] a table in the coffee and orders a café.” Vowels stack on top of each other inside brackets making a “nanny” also a “nunny.” “The pun,” writes Jess Hannah in “Metonymic Brigid Brophy: failures In Transit,” “belongs to what R.A. Shoaf calls the realm of juxtology . . . a ‘device for delaying, interrupting, or otherwise frustrating closure.’ In their suturing together of unexpected, disparate elements, Brophy’s many puns demonstrate their significance to the wider aesthetic and epistemological project.” Goals, roles, language, and action all blur without resolution.

10) A different sort of writer would try to imitate Brophy in a profuse style of their own, but I’ve settled for this already-outdated MFA numbered-paragraph fragmentation. I both know that I can’t compete with Brophy and know that the juxtapositions go down slightly easier if you put numbers before them. Watch:

11) “Perhaps these interludes are holes,” says someone, either Brigid Brophy or Pat O’Rooley. “Or perhaps I have simulated on my canvas both torn canvas and the wall you see through to.”

12) In one of the novel’s regularly scheduled interruptions, Brophy writes: “I am imprisoned inside this I like the tadpole-pupil inside the jelly eye . . . It is not a personality, this jellysac I can’t break out of; it is the mere agglutination of personal characteristics . . . And must I forever shew you everything, including myself, through this not quite transparent, this yellowed, wobbly and probably distorting gelatinous envelope, myself?” I too “cannot shew you anything . . . in its entirety” and instead must opt, as Brophy’s I does, for “constant dissection.”

13) In a 1976 interview, Brophy says: “The whole purpose of fiction is that the writer (and thereby the reader) is transported into some form of life which is absolutely different . . . and to be transported, if one is female, to a male character, and vice versa, is a terribly light transportation.”

14) I used to think about my gender a lot, and I thought that I could think my way through it. Patting at my pants, worrying about entering the wrong bathroom, putting together the pieces of my childhood, things of that nature. It turns out to be—for me as for Pat O’Rooley—a problem you can't think your way through.

15) After Pat establishes that “homosexual women” are the “most double-grievously oppressed social group in the entire history of the human race,” a lesbian uprising ensues (a “butsch,” they call it). Revolutionaries take command of closed-circuit television channels, reeling off the fractured messages that “GRAMMAR IS FOR GRANDMAS” and “SINTAX” and “THERE IS NO REASON.” Instead of seeking to resolve these disjunctions, they instead impose “THE REGIME OF PERPETUAL NOISE.”

16) Whatever you think this book is going to be like, it’s almost certainly going to be weirder. Brophy, Jess Hannah writes, “rejected the label ‘experimental’” in favor of “baroque”—an “explosive embrace of contradictions.” We lose not only the narratorial I but form itself as the tale breaks into pornographic pastiche (a woman named Oc gagged and played like a double bass, with moans escaping at the “light vibrato-tremolo touch” of the Maestro) and dime-store detecting (“Slim O’Rooley slammed straight back to the bar, his passport at the ready in his hand”). 

17) Same interview with Brophy as before: “The pattern (of In Transit) is about a series of disintegrations of rulebooks, including the sexual stereotypes, ending with the question of whether Aristotelian logic might disintegrate, whether we are mistaken in thinking that a thing cannot be both X and not-X . . . the book poses the question of whether the accepted Western sentence structure (subject-verb-object) is also disintegrating . . . do they reflect any necessary truths, or are they entirely arbitrary?”

18) Like the romance languages O’Rooley rules against—I mean rues against—I mean rails against, Irish is a gendered language. Brophy was Irish, as is O’Rooley. “We speak English as a foreign language, even when we have no other,” they say with one voice. “We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that . . . What began as endemic lapsus linguae we peddle as precious lapis.” 

19) I have worked to excise all gendered pronouns from this essay, going so far as to misquote Jess Hannah. Please read into the record that the quote at 9 should end: “her wider aesthetic and epistemological project.” But were it translated into Russian (the only language I know, remotely, beyond English), gendering would be unavoidable with every past tense verb. Even so simple a phrase as “I used to think about my own gender a lot” would require some confession of identity.

20) So In Transit is, of course, a book about gender. It goes so far that I might say every instance of language is about either gender or its lack. Pat O’Rooley is as confused by the vocabulary they’ve been coerced into as by the spot of coffee that obscures the “Ms.” or “Mr.” on their passport.

21) And it is an Irish book. In the tradition of Joyce (“I am the voyce of one crying in the wilderness; reJoyce with me”), and Beckett (O’Rooley disencumbering themself, like the Unnameable, by “compulsive interlocution”) and Flann O’Brien (less the postmodern postmortem of The Third Policeman and more the riotous play of At Swim-Two-Birds). Pat O’Rooley is raised (between biological parents and adoptive) by a “ruggerscrum of mute e’s and transmuted ai’s”—by a Mrs Ni Murteouaigh (“pron. McMurdoch”), a Doctor Ó Dubhthaigh (“pron. O’Duffy”). O’Rooley studies Latin and Greek but never Irish, destined to be a “logically inverted priest, who wear [sic] transvestments and preach Gaylic in hedges and britches.” This lack of native language leaves Pat’s tongue “trip[ping] over [its] roots.”

22) But I do not want you to think that this romp is just James Joyce with tits and with the (alluring) subtitle “The Autobiography of Sappho’s Penis” buried toward the end. It is a book in which, returning to Jess Hannah, “a grammatical decision has an ontological effect” and language begets destiny just as it forgets identity. A novel, writes Hannah, “about a refusal, or an incapacity, to go anywhere.”

23) Even among the novels of the mid-late twentieth century—let alone our current age—it is absolutely singular, more joy than Joyce in every doubled word. Like all great works of art, it is the product of a singular mind—that texture that Iris Murdoch adored. It is a synthesis of high and low, and unruly lesbianism, and the airport’s functional architecture. It careens through the tales of a gameshow called “What’s My Kink?” (featuring the “well-known Irish-German writer, Thomas Mahon”) and genderqueer God falling in love and a musician who plays the “double-buffoon.” It is the kind of book that makes you wonder how anyone published it in the first place, and makes you thank genderqueer God that they did, and that it is back in print. It is a book that reminds you of just how strange the novel form is. It is the synthesis of a whole century that, as O’Rooley reflects, is perhaps in transit. 

24) In Transit is a book to absolutely clobber yourself over the head with, to reveal and revel in the absurdity of the twentieth century and beyond. Each word here is not, as Beckett had it, an unnecessary stain upon silence, but an invitation for another word, and another, until pretty soon you, too, will find yourself not needing to go anywhere.

Katherine Packert Burke is the author of two novels, All Us Saints and Still Life. She lives in Minneapolis, MN.