sarah, plain and tall
Roughly a month ago, otemen came to stay. He brought with him a remarkable little book, called Sarah, the author of which was the by now the much-decried J.T. Leroy.
I knew, sort of peripherally, about the whole Leroy scandal; I never followed the whole thing, as I really don't care what sort of persona an author creates for themselves, wildly fictional and fabricated or not. Most of what I saw in the media seemed to be a sort of footnote to the much more prominent James Frey debacle (I'd skimmed A Million Little Pieces and decided fairly quickly I'd rather pluck my own eyeballs out than read it.) I'm still not sure whether I approve of someone inventing a persona that claims to live with the imminent tragedy of being HIV positive: part of me says "Honesty is the best policy", and the rest of me answers with, "If it helped a few people, or even one person, feel better, who gives a fuck?" Invented heroes, even backwards ones, have a long and glorious tradition of bolstering our own failing fortitude, of course, they just don't usually get unmasked quite so definitively within their own lifetimes.
Nonetheless, it makes more sense to judge an author by their works than by their public face, and, by that standard anyway, I suspect LeRoy passes with flying colours.
The second time I finished Sarah (about a week and a half after the first time: it's a quick read and demanded a second, more thorough, perusing), I hopped on Amazon, mainly out of curiousity, to see what the average reviewer had to say about it. I was pretty surprised to see the outright loathing most readers had for the book, now the author was revealed or at least demystified: what they would accept as semi-memoir, they would not accept as fiction. Most people said that what they'd thought was good writing for an abused sixteen year-old boy was unacceptable from a healthy forty year-old woman. (To which, I say, what the fuck? How can you possibly think that good writing is a variable? Drivel is drivel, no matter who wrote it or when or how much impact it had. Why do you think no one quotes Matthew 1:1 - Matthew 1:16? It's just plain sloppy, that's why.)
Anyway, after all the vitriol, I thought I'd put in my two cents for the LeRoy-creature. He's hardly the Second Coming of Dennis Cooper everyone proclaimed him to be, but he's got a combination of Southern charm and storybook sensibility that seems uniquely his own.
The writing style of Sarah is simplistic, yes, but what every Amazon reviewer seems to forget is that it ought to be. It's easy to overlook in the horrifying sophistication of his trade, but the narrator is a twelve year-old boy, and what LeRoy is telling is not a memoir, or a sophisticated meditation on prostitution: it's a fairy-tale, the transformation of a fledgling lizard from boy to literal pseudo-saint to drug-riddled whore, and back to lizard again, now older and wiser. The parallel isn't exact, but in many ways it's a Hero's Quest, skilfully tempered with the dismal realities of a depressing life. (That's not to say there isn't a lot more to the tale than meets the eye. LeRoy deals competently with the themes of loneliness, rejection and neglect, generally through the main character, who can't wait to start turning tricks to earn his mother's approval and finds comfort in her strap and the touch of a paedophile.)
Much of what LeRoy writes about has the appeal of the familiar to me. His settings are truck stops, rusted-out trailer parks, greasy-spoon diners, near-swamps, American jungles and bars: the kind of places I've passed hundreds of times on my way through the outskirts of South Knoxville or on the Interstate. There's an emphasis on food throughout; nasty local stuff at the "bad" lot, and the kind of exquisite fare that every guest at my grandmother's table gets routinely acquainted with at Sarah's home lot. The casual abuse of children I've seen before, too often-- a smack for misbehaviour, a closed mind when it comes to their futures. (There's a man at my Friends Meeting who runs a home for severely traumatized children... an underage lot-lizard is not, apparently, an entirely uncommon thing.)
The thing I like best about LeRoy's handling of a brutal subject matter is the sheer prosaic quality he manages to imbue in the lifestyle. It becomes blasé faster than I would have thought possible, until, we, too, long to run away from the safety and monotony of the Three Doves' Diner and the eye of a watchful, relatively kind pimp. There's bleak humour, of a kind, which is often funnier for the sheer darkness of it, but there's also a careful manipulation of the reader. By the end of the book, it's a shock to realise you're cheering: not for Sarah to escape his lizard's life altogether, but simply his return to a slightly nicer lot daddy. Yet the payoff, the "happy ending", is just as satisfying-- possibly even more so than a rescue from the lot altogether would have been. (I also had serious trouble keeping straight the gender of each character, but that may have just been me.)
And yet there's something else, too, that makes it all work, something fundamentally Southern that's very hard to elaborate on... where evil knights ride black TransAms, not stallions, and it's vitally important to hold your breath when crossing a bridge. Anne Rice has it, in her better moments of writing about New Orleans. The opening pages of A Death in the Family have it. All the best of our writers have it, and LeRoy radiates the combination of casual, inbred Christianity, mysticism, superstition, prejudice, oral history, misplaced chivalry and sheer creepiness that is the hallmark of the South. The most accurate comparison I can think of is Flannery O'Connor: the sense that the story you are reading is not bound by the confines of logic, that there are layers of dark water underneath it. He'll never be everyone's thing, of course, but if you're up for a brief, wrenching, bizarrely mythic trip, Sarah's damn good, y'all.
(In unrelated news, I naturally choose to redo my LiveJournal layout during the week the moderators are reorganizing everything. Currently the "Journal Title:" and "Journal Subtitle:" boxes are missing, which is odd, but no doubt it will all be straightened out.)
I knew, sort of peripherally, about the whole Leroy scandal; I never followed the whole thing, as I really don't care what sort of persona an author creates for themselves, wildly fictional and fabricated or not. Most of what I saw in the media seemed to be a sort of footnote to the much more prominent James Frey debacle (I'd skimmed A Million Little Pieces and decided fairly quickly I'd rather pluck my own eyeballs out than read it.) I'm still not sure whether I approve of someone inventing a persona that claims to live with the imminent tragedy of being HIV positive: part of me says "Honesty is the best policy", and the rest of me answers with, "If it helped a few people, or even one person, feel better, who gives a fuck?" Invented heroes, even backwards ones, have a long and glorious tradition of bolstering our own failing fortitude, of course, they just don't usually get unmasked quite so definitively within their own lifetimes.
Nonetheless, it makes more sense to judge an author by their works than by their public face, and, by that standard anyway, I suspect LeRoy passes with flying colours.
The second time I finished Sarah (about a week and a half after the first time: it's a quick read and demanded a second, more thorough, perusing), I hopped on Amazon, mainly out of curiousity, to see what the average reviewer had to say about it. I was pretty surprised to see the outright loathing most readers had for the book, now the author was revealed or at least demystified: what they would accept as semi-memoir, they would not accept as fiction. Most people said that what they'd thought was good writing for an abused sixteen year-old boy was unacceptable from a healthy forty year-old woman. (To which, I say, what the fuck? How can you possibly think that good writing is a variable? Drivel is drivel, no matter who wrote it or when or how much impact it had. Why do you think no one quotes Matthew 1:1 - Matthew 1:16? It's just plain sloppy, that's why.)
Anyway, after all the vitriol, I thought I'd put in my two cents for the LeRoy-creature. He's hardly the Second Coming of Dennis Cooper everyone proclaimed him to be, but he's got a combination of Southern charm and storybook sensibility that seems uniquely his own.
The writing style of Sarah is simplistic, yes, but what every Amazon reviewer seems to forget is that it ought to be. It's easy to overlook in the horrifying sophistication of his trade, but the narrator is a twelve year-old boy, and what LeRoy is telling is not a memoir, or a sophisticated meditation on prostitution: it's a fairy-tale, the transformation of a fledgling lizard from boy to literal pseudo-saint to drug-riddled whore, and back to lizard again, now older and wiser. The parallel isn't exact, but in many ways it's a Hero's Quest, skilfully tempered with the dismal realities of a depressing life. (That's not to say there isn't a lot more to the tale than meets the eye. LeRoy deals competently with the themes of loneliness, rejection and neglect, generally through the main character, who can't wait to start turning tricks to earn his mother's approval and finds comfort in her strap and the touch of a paedophile.)
Much of what LeRoy writes about has the appeal of the familiar to me. His settings are truck stops, rusted-out trailer parks, greasy-spoon diners, near-swamps, American jungles and bars: the kind of places I've passed hundreds of times on my way through the outskirts of South Knoxville or on the Interstate. There's an emphasis on food throughout; nasty local stuff at the "bad" lot, and the kind of exquisite fare that every guest at my grandmother's table gets routinely acquainted with at Sarah's home lot. The casual abuse of children I've seen before, too often-- a smack for misbehaviour, a closed mind when it comes to their futures. (There's a man at my Friends Meeting who runs a home for severely traumatized children... an underage lot-lizard is not, apparently, an entirely uncommon thing.)
The thing I like best about LeRoy's handling of a brutal subject matter is the sheer prosaic quality he manages to imbue in the lifestyle. It becomes blasé faster than I would have thought possible, until, we, too, long to run away from the safety and monotony of the Three Doves' Diner and the eye of a watchful, relatively kind pimp. There's bleak humour, of a kind, which is often funnier for the sheer darkness of it, but there's also a careful manipulation of the reader. By the end of the book, it's a shock to realise you're cheering: not for Sarah to escape his lizard's life altogether, but simply his return to a slightly nicer lot daddy. Yet the payoff, the "happy ending", is just as satisfying-- possibly even more so than a rescue from the lot altogether would have been. (I also had serious trouble keeping straight the gender of each character, but that may have just been me.)
And yet there's something else, too, that makes it all work, something fundamentally Southern that's very hard to elaborate on... where evil knights ride black TransAms, not stallions, and it's vitally important to hold your breath when crossing a bridge. Anne Rice has it, in her better moments of writing about New Orleans. The opening pages of A Death in the Family have it. All the best of our writers have it, and LeRoy radiates the combination of casual, inbred Christianity, mysticism, superstition, prejudice, oral history, misplaced chivalry and sheer creepiness that is the hallmark of the South. The most accurate comparison I can think of is Flannery O'Connor: the sense that the story you are reading is not bound by the confines of logic, that there are layers of dark water underneath it. He'll never be everyone's thing, of course, but if you're up for a brief, wrenching, bizarrely mythic trip, Sarah's damn good, y'all.
(In unrelated news, I naturally choose to redo my LiveJournal layout during the week the moderators are reorganizing everything. Currently the "Journal Title:" and "Journal Subtitle:" boxes are missing, which is odd, but no doubt it will all be straightened out.)