Review: "People Collide" by Isle McElroy

People Collide by Isle McElroy
Published September 2023 via HarperVia
★★★★

In a studio flat in Bulgaria, Eli wakes up to a new perspective: he has somehow slipped into the body of his wife, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth—along with Eli's body—is gone. What follows is a romp from Bulgaria to Paris to the US Midwest as Eli follows the clues of Elizabeth's disappearance and tries to make some sense out of what comes next.

Without question one of the odder things I've read recently, People Collide stands out for not asking the obvious questions. Eli and Elizabeth are together in an opposites-attract sort of way, with Elizabeth powering through on a Type A schedule and Eli drifting through life. In a subversion of Hollywood expectation (anyone else remember "On Thin Ice" with Tara Lipinski?), he takes his shift into Elizabeth's body in stride, sinking into the new body rather than questioning it and trying to both hold on to the commentary he imagines from Elizabeth and apply his own self to the experience.

People Collide is not a novel of a trans experience, exactly, but it is impossible not to see the connections. There would be so much to explore in a paper on this novel—if I'd read this as a grad student in a lit class I'd have been all over it for allegory and metaphor and symbolism. (Also, if I'd read this in grad school it probably would have been in a short-story format—in a way this feels like a very long short story.) You have to be ready to accept the unexplained and let the story take you where it wants to, but if you're in the mood for it those are some interesting places indeed.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.