Synopsis
Two novellas deal with fifty years of gay life in New York City and the memories of a semi-retired transvestite ballerina
Reviews
McCourt is nothing if not consistent. These two linked novellas give us the same characters and voices previously heard in his celebrated earlier works Kaye Wayfaring in " Avenged" and Mawdrew Czgowchwz. In the first novella, "I Go Back to the Mais Oui," Delancy, a 40-ish gay performance artist, dramatically recollects (with Firbankian abstraction, speed-queen timing and outrageous, bitchy wit) the highlights of his life over the past 25 years. The name-dropping riff cites "Jackson Pollock, the Kouros of Melanes, Judy Garland in her coffin at Campbell's, and Tito Gobbi as Scarpia." "A Chance to Talk" finds Delancey riding the milk train out to Easthampton, meeting and matching wits with the brilliant transvestite ballerina Odette O'Doyle, whose voice and opinions are just as kinetically pitched as Delancey's own. Age and AIDS give these frothy, entertaining evocations of New York's gay subculture all the melancholy resonance of a last call at the piano bar. To those who comprehend its nuances, this book will surely give pleasure; the rest of the reading public may be somewhat bewildered. A tour de force of high camp, Manhattan-style, this collection proves McCourt is a dazzling practitioner of the lost language of queens.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In the latest from McCourt (Mawdrew Czgowchwz, 1975; Kate Wayfaring in ``Avenged'', 1984), the first story of two--``I Go Back to the Mais Oui''--acts as an overture for its much longer successor. Danny Delancey, a gay New York performance-artist, recalls the camp-wild days of downtown artistic gay culture before AIDS: the bars, baths, cults (for Judy G. and Callas, for McCourt's own original Kate Wayfaring and Mawdrew Czgowchwz), and the Hamptons. But it is the long soliloquized novella--``A Chance to Talk''--where everything becomes truly personalized, from the lips of Odette O'Doyle, a renowned drag-queen ballerina newly arrived from Europe and taking the train out to the South Fork in the company of Danny. Nothing goes past or surprises Odette: he/she's seen it and done it all; and McCourt lets his character talk about St. Augustine, de Kooning, the unsafe-sex young (``They're still at it, I thought, like Carolina snake-handling Baptists, besotted in their religion exactly like believers in the thoroughly discredited appendix to the Gospel of Mark: believing they can beguile the cobra and drink any deadly thing and it shall not harm them, all because they are wearing the talisman: not ankh, and not the cross, but the pink triangle''); poets like John Ashbery, James Merrill, and James Schuyler (here called ``the Skylark''); painters and transvestites and scandals. Synoptic like a gospel itself (though the news is hardly glad)--Odette's recitations are brilliant, touching, funny, self-deprecating: flamboyance warmed with wisdom. McCourt is no easy writer, but his way with disorder and sorrow--early and late- -is not to be missed. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"I Go Back to the Mais Oui," the first of two stories offered here, presents a summation of 40 years of gay life in New York by protagonist Danny Delancey, thereby providing a context for the much lengthier "Time Remaining," which follows. In that piece--a novel, really--Danny is joined by Odette O'Doyle, an ancient, wise, all-knowing drag queen who has lived through those 40 years. As they ride the midnight train across Long Island, Odette unbeads his pearls, dropping story after story from his personal epic. And what an epic! McCourt presents us with an encyclopedic view of gay New York, from high to low culture, from Frank O'Hara, Judy Garland, and the Everard Baths to ACT UP and the Clit Club, leaving no queer stone unturned. For some, Odette's discursive, anecdotal, manic soliloquy may be off-putting. But taken together, these brilliant stories add up to a life, one full of wit and anger, courage and love. Highly recommended.
- Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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