Delancey's Way - Hardcover

McCourt, James

 
9780375403118: Delancey's Way
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375403116 ISBN 13: 9780375403118
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A satirical novel of American politics follows a reporter as he is questioned about a plot to assassinate the president, and introduces a cast of bizarre characters, including a socialite and ex1980s party girl, a senator who is sleeping with a porn star, a retired transvestite ballerina, and many others.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 <b>Time Remaining, Kaye Wayfaring in "Avenged,"</b> and <b>Mawrdew Czgowchwz</b>. His stories have appeared in <i>The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Grand Street</i>, and <i>The Yale Review</i>. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Aus dem Klappentext

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

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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...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375403116
ISBN 13 
9780375403118
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
369
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