Isle McElroy’s sophomore novel, People Collide, begins with a literal save-the-cat trope, used to delightfully deliberate impact.

Originating because the title of a well-liked screenwriting guide by Blake Snyder, “save the cat” refers to the concept that a story ought to set up the likeability of its important character — by having them, for instance, save a cat that is caught in a tree — early within the textual content in order that the viewers is on board with that character’s coming journey.

“Each day,” McElroy’s narrator Eli explains on the novel’s first web page, “is a chance to discard your most pitiable habits and selves…When I stepped outside into the grand street in front of my apartment complex, I found, before me, a chance to become someone better: a hero. A cat lay dead in the street, splayed on the pavement in front of a dumpster. A kitten.” Eli, who’s hoping to at the very least place the lifeless cat within the dumpster, runs upstairs to get a plastic bag and comes again to choose up the lifeless kitten — solely to find the kitten wasn’t lifeless in any respect however solely sleeping. Has he saved the cat, then? Or has he merely confirmed to the reader that he desires to be the sort of one who might? Regardless, the introduction to Eli through this anecdote heightens the self-awareness current all through People Collide that strengthens the humorous, self-deprecating, and terribly insecure narrator.

Eli is married to Elizabeth — her identify almost encompassing his — and resides along with her in Bulgaria the place she’s finishing a fellowship by which she “led lessons on American culture for teenagers who, even at their most invested, found her indoctrinating lessons taxing and ridiculous.” But she’s a author, actually, and so is Eli, though they’ve very completely different approaches to their artistic endeavors.

The plot actually kicks off when Eli arrives at Elizabeth’s office to find that persons are addressing him as if he is his spouse. When he lastly realizes that he’s, certainly, inside Elizabeth’s physique, he understandably freaks out and spends a number of days at dwelling making an attempt to determine what is going on on. He assumes, appropriately it seems, that simply as he is inside Elizabeth’s physique, she have to be inside his, however he cannot discover her or his personal physique wherever — and she or he’s not answering his mobile phone, which she presumably has along with her. If the dynamics of the married couple’s genders confuses you right here, that is as a result of they’re imagined to.

Indeed, witnessing Eli strive to determine easy methods to navigate the world in his spouse’s physique is fascinating. Tempting because it is likely to be to attract a neat line between discovering one’s trans id and Eli’s expertise of uncomfortable embodiment, that is not what is going on on right here, at the very least not at first. Eli is frankly unnerved by his entry to his spouse’s physique’s sexuality on this approach — from inside somewhat than with out — and does not try to discover her physicality in that approach. Instead, he tries to individuate himself: “I liked the idea of doing something Elizabeth wouldn’t. If I were going to be her, then I may as well be her on my terms. I occupied a space where neither she nor I seemed to exist, free from the expectations of our personalities.”

What turns into clear over the course of the novel is that Eli’s discomfort inside Elizabeth, this new approach of navigating the world as her, stems from a deep dislike of, and elementary misunderstanding of, himself. Like most of us, Eli cannot inform what first impressions individuals have of him. He perceives himself as awkward, lazy, a deadbeat who is not almost adequate for his striving and overachieving spouse. Their class backgrounds are completely different as are their households, and Eli cannot run from these realities; they continue to be part of his psychology regardless of his new physique. As the saying goes, irrespective of the place you go, there you’re.

When he lastly finds Elizabeth, Eli is struck by their variations in inhabiting one another’s our bodies: “Elizabeth appeared at ease in my body in ways that I’d never been. She proceeded confidently, and I envied her, not only because I struggled to make sense of her body but because it seemed unfair that she might be a better version of me than I’d ever been.” It’s solely upon assembly Elizabeth in Eli’s physique that readers get to see what it’s that she loves about him, as he is spent a lot of the novel as much as that time cataloguing his flaws. But she does love him, as a lot as he loves her, however neither of them has a straightforward time loving one another.

Ultimately, People Collide‘s Freaky Friday idea covers a deep exploration of marriage, love, and the methods we all know each other — and do not — in addition to how slippery a way of self might be when a lot of how we navigate the world will depend on the way it sees us.

Ilana Masad is a fiction author, guide critic, and creator of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers.