Delancey's Way - Hardcover

McCourt, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403116 ISBN 13: 9780375403118

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

An operatic, satirical romp through (high and low) Washington -- filled with politicos and pundits, divas and divine spirits -- by the greatly admired author of Time Remaining and the cult classic Mawrdew Czgowchwz ("Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor, in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov" -- Susan Sontag).


It opens with Delancey, a reporter for the East Hampton Star, being sent to cover the environmental budget wars of the 104th Congress, his copy of Henry Adams's Democracy in hand, for background on the farrago called overnment. It introduces us to le tout de Washington: the socialite (and exiled eighties New York party girl) Anastasia Harrington (a.k.a. Bam-Bam) and her billionaire husband, Max; a senator obsessed with the fall of the republic and with his rogue companion, an ex-hustler and congressional phone-sex virtuoso; the semiretired transvestite ballerina Odette O'Doyle and the diva (operatic and otherwise) Vana Sprezza; and Delancey's new friend, Ornette, a living antidote to the racism of our times, who sympathizes with the sexually profligate President (lovingly referred to as POTUS).


From Delancey's trip on the Metroliner where it all begins, to a drink-soaked escapade in Key West, to soirees at the Harringtons' and the Cosmos Club, to the grand finale (an uproarious Venetian bal masqué at the Library of Congress), McCourt shows us the pyrotechnic power plays of the nineties, eerily parallel to (but far deadlier than) those portrayed in Adams's chronicle of earlier times. Here is Washington as it should be seen -- upside down, and inside right.

About this title

About the Author

James McCourt was born in New York City and was educated at Manhattan College, New York University, and the Yale School of Drama. He is the author of Time Remaining, Kaye Wayfaring in "Avenged," and Mawrdew Czgowchwz. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street, and The Yale Review. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.

From the Inside Flap

satirical romp through (high and low) Washington -- filled with politicos and pundits, divas and divine spirits -- by the greatly admired author of <b>Time Remaining</b> and the cult classic <b>Mawrdew Czgowchwz</b> ("Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor, in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov" -- Susan Sontag).<br><br><br>It opens with Delancey, a reporter for the <i>East Hampton Star</i>, being sent to cover the environmental budget wars of the 104th Congress, his copy of Henry Adams's <b>Democracy</b> in hand, for background on the farrago called overnment. It introduces us to le tout de Washington: the socialite (and exiled eighties New York party girl) Anastasia Harrington (a.k.a. Bam-Bam) and her billionaire husband, Max; a senator obsessed with the fall of the republic and with his rogue companion, an ex-hustler and congressional phone-sex virtuoso; the semiretired transvestite ballerina Odette O'Doyle and the diva (operatic and oth

Reviews

McCourts latest potboiler cuts an uneven swath through the nations capital, lovingly portrayed (in the sharpest Hogarthian lines) as a nest of social climbers, criminals, homosexuals, mafiosi, religious fanatics, black supremacists, and politicians. Weve met Danny Delancey and many of his friends before (Time Remaining, 1993, etc.). A reporter for the East Hampton Star (Long Islands toniest local paper), Delancey is an inveterate survivor who grew up on the Lower East Side, went off to a Christian Brothers boarding school, and came out in Greenwich Village (during the pre-AIDS bacchanal of the 1970s, no less)and lives to tell the tale. Now, in early middle age, he leads a somewhat more sedate life on the eastern edge of Long Island, but he can still rise to the occasion when adventure beckons. This particular adventure, however, doesnt look particularly wild at first: It begins when Delancey is assigned to cover the congressional debate over a new environmental bill. Once inside the District, though, Delancey finds himself in a world as foreign and malign to him as the plains of Kansas would be to Kurt Weill. The president, a Bill Clinton look-alike known as POTUS, is something of a local joke, but Delancey soon finds himself sniffing out what seems to be the scent of some vast conspiracy against the manand not just against his politics, either. Is an assassination plot hatching? Delancey has the advantage of being an outsider who can ask questions without arousing suspicion, and he also has an array of friendsgay porn star Rain, Georgetown society hostess Bam-Bam, opera diva Vana Sprezzawho can open doors that most journalists dont even know how to find in broad daylight. But intelligence is only half the equation: Can Delancey tell the tale? Judge for yourself. A bit hyperactive even for a thriller, but McCourts narrative has a nice satiric edge and an air of credibility that make it worth packing for the next campaign. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Sometimes this book is funny, and sometimes it's very funny. What it is, is an acidic romp through the political high and low roads of Washington, where the President is known as POTUS and Hillary (sometimes) as FLOTUS, with a wacky cast. The book is dense with allusion--political, literary, filmic, operatic, mythological, and more--uncommon in today's watery literary scene. The writing can veer from plain to stream-of-consciousness to labyrinthine. Thus, the same page can yield "Clinton is a masochistic hick out of Dogpatch turned high toned sadist," and "Clinton as Clint Eastwood--the quintessential Quantrill's Raiders personality." It is not so much a "story" as a set of rants in a loose narrative structure, and as such it can be sampled as well as read through, which might save one some annoyance with Delancey himself, the overly self-satisfied hip-gay narrator. Interesting, inspired, informed, and sometimes frustrating, this book will click with some, but it is not for the everyday library patron.
-Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

McCourt's first long fiction since Time Remaining (1993) is a dizzying, outrageous view of the puzzle palaces on the Potomac, with politics as pornography and Washington, D.C., as a city of nothingness. Gay scribe Delancey of the East Hampton Star, in the company of O'Maurigan and transvestite Odette O'Doyle, is sent south--ostensibly to report on environmental legislation in the 104th Congress--where he is guided by wealthy industrialist mover-and-shaker Mix Harrington (husband of Delancey pal Anastasia, aka BamBam), a pair of African American Library of Congress staffers, and the canny, connected aide of a senator elected for having the name of an Ayn Rand hero. Delancey becomes more involved than he'd intended (although plot becomes submerged in verbiage), and hardly any of the real-life characters (including Senate majority leader "Blob Dull") get out unscathed, except for David Souter. For McCourt fans and those solidly grounded in the liberal arts, pop culture, and Washington itself, this may be a treat. Others may demur, since McCourt is not an easy read and--as in public library collections--there's something here to offend almost anyone. Michele Leber

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One / Aperture

I never went to bed early in my life.

Until a minute ago . . .

You might have known it would all start out that way.

The first sentence I heard in my own head on the Metroliner to Washington. I'd put down Democracy (you know, the novel of Washington by "Anonymous" turned out to be written -- depending on your politics, or your psychic -- by either Henry or Clover Adams), gone to the back of the club car and from the window watched the tracks seeming to issue in two steel ribbons from underneath the train, then returned to my seat, a permeable signifier full of metaphoric dread, and succumbed to a little nap, tired of others' voices and of my own plans.

No systematic chronicle, I told myself as I drifted off, but more a rambling disquisition, with copious historical discussion and many anecdotes.

I never went to bed early in my life. Until a minute ago. Two lies, a sentence and a phrase, in the forced conjunction (or dual emphasis) of which there arises a tensile ambiguity -- between the stronger and the weaker force -- that sparks narrative. Always a forced conjunction, a duality, since what is a true sequence (this/that) if not an uninterrupted flow of conscious-radical-unconscious ideation-pulsation, lasting from the moment of birth until the moment of insanity and/or death? Nothing.

Rearranging narrative, like dealing cards or holding on to a bunch of the dialogue balloons O'Maurigan and Patsy Southgate had said held the story's hot air (back then / back there, before the unspooling tracks, in the darkened offices of the East Hampton Star on the Sunday afternoon in early September when I'd decided to accept the assignment to go to Washington and report on the crucial environmental legislative battles in the 104th Congress), all of which -- balloons -- when pinpricked, would burst like Bazooka bubble gum, leaving a free mind (if maybe a funny-looking, Bazooka-bubble-gum-coated face . . . but then, why not?).

Until a minute ago. It's supposed to make you nervous. The climax of Double Indemnity. Who can forget Stanwyck's shattering intonation . . . "until a minute ago"? Enacting one of two things, maybe both: a sudden awakening and determination to say at least one true thing before dying -- the wicked woman's last-minute conversion, the perfect act of contrition that would save her from the maw of hell by the skin of her teeth; and/or a born hellion's last desperate (and, as it turns out, useless) ploy.

(The narrative shuttle: it jerks back and forth, until it winds down, and then it winds up again and unwinds in crazy spools of dream life, as at the back of the train clacking along to Washington -- me out on the imaginary observation platform asking myself: Will my story wind up like Fred MacMurray's, scraping its guts up off the floor and pouring them into the ear of the Dictaphone, while the older man who loves me -- and still smokes cigars -- waits to deliver the tag line?

It didn't: it ended up less than a year later back in the offices of the East Hampton Star, again on a sunny Sunday, with the shades drawn, at the debriefing that even as I speak you are reading. This is called interactive -- the Vice President is all for it.)

"Every education is a kind of inward journey," he (the Vice President) had written in Earth in the Balance. "My study of the global environment has required a searching re-examination of the ways in which political motives and government policies have helped to create the crisis and now frustrate the solutions we need."

(That I should have wanted to listen to him any further at all struck me as entirely improbable, but that in itself might well have been the reason.)

So, to Washington -- and to politics. ("Show business for ugly people," the late-night-television clown had called it. Did he ever so much as glance at the Vice President?) Politics done with smoke and mirrors. Smoky backrooms in which the President -- POTUS -- may never have inhaled -- as the trick he's mastered of holding his breath until others turn blue seems to have ensured his survival.

And the mirrors? Something like: Hamlet tells the Player King to hold the mirror up to nature, but the Player King remembers what Jackson Pollock snapped when similarly advised: "I am nature." POTUS has done the same, saying, "Think I'll just hold the mirror up to me, and you can look over my shoulder."

"It seems to me" (Patsy S.) "you want to get as close as you can to the feeling the motion picture creates -- not that a story is about to be told, but that it has been told already -- that the readers have stumbled into a story they well know."

O'Maurigan said, "All right then, let's start with the telephone call."

September 1995, later that first Sunday afternoon. I was alone in Sagaponack. Phil, packing his circa-1957 Ceccone evening wear, had gone off a week earlier with Concha, the sister, in a black limo to the airport -- and from there to Sicily to investigate the possibility of opening the old homestead as a hotel. (I wanted Phil to sell out to her: we have more than enough, and Concha has always hated me -- wants to get Phil to go back to the old country for good.) I was about to turn the house over for the duration of my Washington stay to Concha's grandson Vinny (estranged from his father, Phil's nephew, a jerk, who also hates me, the rich uncle's faggot enchanter) and Vinny's boyfriend, Matt.

I'd started writing Phil once a day, getting as many responses, which could be another book, besides the one in progress I was amazed he wrote every day. I love him more than I can say, as Judy sang.


He wrote, for example, of the baroness Teresa Cordopatri dei Capece, in Calabria, whose brother was blown away for refusing to sell the last of their olive groves, and who is now a crusader. The Mafia in Sicily is more interested in tourism, according to Concha, who is a realist, I give her that. Nevertheless I worried; I said, "Why don't we go out and get you a cellular phone and I can call you once a day and tell you what's going on?"

Phil said, "That's crazy." I said, "It's what everybody's doing now." He said, "In the first place I'll be talking Sicilian all day long, which puts me in what the kids today call 'a different head.'" I said, "The day the kids who said that said it in is not today, it was the sixties. Today those kids have kids: they all use the cellular."

He said, "Look, Odette and the Mick will be with you, and this way I'll be sure everything's OK." I said, "He's an O', not a Mc." He said, "To me they're all micks; you know what I mean."

(Well, there's the feeling of manly freedom-in-action; then there's the feeling you're being looked after. I prefer it.)

Back to the telephone -- me picking it up.

"Delancey, darling! A voice from out of the past."

"Out of the Past is a movie," I remarked.

"Would you ever guess who?"

(From out of the storied past.) "I don't have to; there's only one voice -- "

"Anastasia."

"I was coming to that part."

The voice of Anastasia Harrington, beautiful eighties New York party girl (I'd first encountered walking stark naked out of the surf at Sagaponack one fabulous summer afternoon looking like a dark-auburn version of the Botticelli Venus-on-the-half-shell) whose fortunes, due to a truly stunning talent for rubbing up against the nether parts of Gotham's markdown-Eurovagrant glitterati, had often turned on a dime.

Exiled, it was said, after a spat with Brooke Astor over the financing of nothing less than her wedding . . . not of course to a Eurorat, but to Max Harrington (of the copper Harringtons, as Truman C. would have put it had he lived to bark out loud over it). Max was the kind of Harrington Gertrude Slescynski had in mind when she took the name (and Anastasia was a girl who wouldn't be caught dead in anything by Clovis Ruffin, and into money: "Money isn't everything -- it just goes with everything!") and had been described as "a strange amalgam of Armand Hammer, George Soros, and Steve Forbes." He was -- importantly, suddenly to somebody in my new role -- a supporter of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. I would have to be entertained by him while opposing him, for the Harrington family had branched out from copper into leaching gold, polluting Western rivers with cyanide, and hoarding the helium reserves, whatever they were. (Pay attention, they become significant.) How handy, in the nicest possible way, to have been a friend of his wife's -- on the Christmas card list, all that.

Anastasia Harrington, Washington wife, had herself taken to the television airwaves, while hubby had stayed closeted (and that word, in another connection, had been circulating about him for years too, more frenetically since his marriage). I found her as camp as Hedda Lettuce -- that big-boned woman in the land of New York make-believe -- but others she made nervous. These were they with some experience of the instinctual internal combustion of her impressively primed hereditary Greek revenge engine, which, consequence of intensely vindictive file-keeping startling even to Gotham touts -- though not to those who recalled her late-sixties incarnation as a fascist kitten's paw in her native Athens -- had already earned her the nickname Stasi. (They didn't like her any better on television than in life.)

"A voice," the voice continued, "from out of the past, but not a voice from the dead, thank God."

"Good, I don't think I could handle one of those just at the moment."

"This movie -- there's a woman in it, of course, who dies."

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375403116
• ISBN 13: 9780375403118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384