The Body Spoken

Two strangers meet on a train to L.A., both fleeing from wrecked lives, and without exchanging names, a deep intimacy grows between the two as the woman reveals she has lived the last five years as a man

Filmmaker and novelist Deaner (Where Blue Begins) skillfully evokes the framework and dreamy pacing of film in this affecting novel about two strangers who meet on a train. At Manhattan's Penn Station, Hemy Lourde (the apt French name means "heavy") boards an Amtrak liner bound for L.A. She sits next to a male passenger and begins their dialogue with the cryptic remark that she's been living as a man, under her beloved brother's name, for five years. As the train makes its way over the American landscape, Hemy recounts the story of her life to the fascinated stranger, who becomes her lover en route. Born in the 1970s in upstate New York to a playwright father and a fervently imaginative mother, Hemy, sister Zellie and brother Oscar grow up working in the family business?a nightclub/bar located in their living room, serving illegal homemade liquor. Hemy's early sexual confusion is exacerbated when she tries to save a man from a racist attack and accidentally shoots off part of the assailant's genitals. Although Hemy and her victim, Mr. Antonovsky, a Russian survivor of Stalinist-era terror, develop a strangely beautiful and healing relationship, Hemy can't escape the persistent rumors of the town gossips, and she begins a tormented period of her life. During the four-day journey, Hemy engages her lover, who is fleeing phantoms of his own, in the story of her failed marriage, her work (as a man) in a prison, speculations on lesbianism and the violent recovery of her sense of womanhood. Told alternately in the first- and third-person, the narrative is lyrically written and urgently paced, a fluid American odyssey that combines the cinematic glamour of Body Heat and Murder on the Orient Express with the black-and-white film verite of a Death Row prison documentary. Through Hemy's gender crisis, Deaner offers a provocative exploration of identity, transforming the young woman's nightmarish past into a bittersweet trajectory toward her unique sexual truths.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Deaners arresting second novel (Where Blue Begins, 1993), in its dreamy way, takes on gender, power, and the frailty of truth. Aboard a train, Hemy Lourde confides to a stranger, ``I've been living as a man for five years.'' Intrigued, the man (who remains nameless) asks her to elaborate, and so begins their conversational journey from New York to Los Angeles. Hemy begins with the tale of her pastoral childhood in the early '70s: her psychic, elegant mother Bo, her failed playwright father, her two sisters, and her brother Oscar, whom she loves (including in the carnal sense). When Bo built a still and opened a speakeasy, their financial woes abated, until a surprising turn of events forced Hemy to shoot a Mr. Antonovsky in the groin, as their still exploded in the background. When Happy, a shady underworld type, appeared on the scene, the still was rebuilt, though a second explosion, probably a bombing, left Hemy's family decimated, with her father, Oscar, and little sister Frieda dead, and Bo and older sister Zellie in comas. As the train trip continues, through plains to desert to mountains, Hemy's story unfolds within a constant mood of sexual tension and exploration; the man who is her continental companion grows convinced that shes lying, yet he wants to know more anyhow, needs to understand what has brought this beautiful woman to live as a manand, for her part, Hemy also needs to confess to him. Only toward the end does Deaner falter, when a far too ordinary explanation is given for Hemy's strange life, and when repetitions diminish the tales strength. Oddly compelling, if flawed. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Move over, Scheherazade, and make room for Hemy Lourde. Hemy, a young woman returning to the world from an all-but-ruined life, has an astonishing story to relate to the man she meets on a long rail journey west. Warned by her eccentric mother early on that she may either love a man or change the world, she attempts to control her destiny after nearly insurmountable sorrows and finds a bottomless spiritual reserve at her core. In the hands of a less talented and creative storyteller, this story could collapse under the weight of such an ambitious theme. Yet it's nearly impossible to resist Hemy's story, told sparingly as it is to the man she meets, a man with his own demons to exorcise. Readers wandering into Deaner's second novel (after Where Blue Begins, LJ 2/1/93) for a few pages will want to stay till the end.?Margaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.