Ultimately, it’s all about the subtext. A lot of readers—and even more than a mere handful of writers—labor under the delusion they connect to a certain novel because of the story existing on the surface of the narrative text. It’s the same deal with movies, of course: when you watch a film that unleashes the waterworks and you can’t stop crying, have ever you ever stopped to think how absurd a concept it is that you are really crying over what happens to people you just met that don’t even exist?
Writers and readers alike all want to believe that we get emotionally caught up in a story because we connect so intensely to the characters, but that connection only takes place when there is something going on beneath the story. Casey McQuiston’s novel One Last Stop has unfortunately been too often compared to a similar time travel romance with the twist on its own sexuality resulting in being referred to as a “queer Kate & Leopold.” This is so limiting as to verge on damaging. That storyline itself—the narrative text—can be called something of science fiction lesbian romance novel, but the minute you do that you limit the readership. If the marketing would focus on the subtext of the story, it could be sold to a much broader audience.
A generalized overview of the plot of the novel is that a woman from today meets a woman from the 1970’s on the New York subway who is stuck not just in that particular place, but out of sync with both time periods. She can’t exit the subway into the modern world any more than she can exit back into the world of CBGB, the Yankees of Reggie and Thurman Munson, and the haunting specter of Son of Sam. And yet, at the very same time, this out-of-sync woman—Jane—is very much still trapped in her own time. Jane is a leather-jacketed punk rocker who may not be able to return to the 1970’s, but still very belongs there even though she exists—in a limited way—in the here and now. Sure, it is a story all kind of science fiction-y and sure the romantic feelings between Jane the modern-day August is all kind of lesbian chick lit-y, but what is really going on here beneath the surface?
You’ve got a romance that can’t quite get kickstarted because one part is living in the present and the other is stuck in the past. Sound familiar? One need not be a time traveler to be stuck in the past while existing in the present. And here’s the kicker: it is not just Jane who is stuck in the past. August’s mother has been stuck in the past while living in the present in her effort to privately investigate what happened to her brother. Even worse is that she has made her daughter a part of this obsessive quest and that is precisely why August has struck out on her own with an apartment in New York that puts her on that subway that leads to Jane. August has herself been forcibly stuck in the past and is finally making the attempt to move on. And that, in a nutshell, is what the subtext is all about, moving on.
Eventually—inevitably—Jane is wrenched out of her time prison and brought into the modern world. It is a world of wonder:
“She dedicates herself to learning everything about life in the twenty-first century and develops fixations on the most random modern inventions. Self-checkout stations at grocery stores freak her out, as do vape pens and almost any kind of social media, but she’s fascinated by the Chromecast and Taco Bell beefy five-layer burritos.”
That is the narrative; that is the textual layer. Read between the lines and get to the subtext and what is really going on here? Have you or someone you know ever had a really hard time dealing with a break-up? Binge-watching over and over the same old TV shows or movies once defined them as a couple. Going to the same places they used to frequent together. Basically becoming, like Jane, stuck in a place out of sync with both the past and the present. And then suddenly one day they start talking about this show they’ve gotten hooked on. Or this new restaurant that they can’t get enough of. And just like that they back in the present and are starting to let the past go. Being stuck in time isn’t science fiction when it comes to romance. It is literally happening to millions of people around the world every single day.
One Last Stop certainly qualifies as lesbian fiction, but to pigeonhole it as merely a time travel story is to do a great disservice. This is a novel capable of appealing to a tremendous number of people comprised of anyone who has ever been so firmly rooted in the nostalgia of the past that they can’t quite accommodate the present and are useless for the future until they realize they can never go really go back in time and simply need to let it go and move on.
