The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
By J.T. LeRoy
Bloomsbury/$23.95
There may be no rest to former hustler J.T. LeRoy's compulsion to exorcise his abusive past in autobiographical detail, but this new collection of stories shows it doesn't matter so long as he continues to write without restraint.
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things is LeRoy's follow-up to his debut novel, Sarah, published in April 2000, when he was just 20. Sarah's narrator, the androgynous 12-year-old son of a "lot lizard," or truck-stop whore, returns in these stories, struggling for the attention of his wandering mother, who locks him in the car while she has one-night stands with bar pickups, dresses him in clothes that reek of urine and leaves him in the care of her sexually abusive ex-fiance.
The collection's final story, "Natoma Street," leaves you feeling like you got punched in the solar plexus. It follows the narrator, now a young man, as he pays to be tortured and revisits a powerful moment in his history of sexual punishment. The story ends with the narrator strung up and being cut with a switchblade: "I hang here, the voices still bleeding in my ears. I watch my shadow, solid like a murdered body's outline, and I pray. Maybe one more slice, just one more, will sever it forever."
LeRoy is currently working on a sequel to Sarah and a collaborative book of fiction with author Dennis Cooper. He also contributes a monthly column to Shout magazine and conducts interviews for New York Press. The busy author's also working with writer/director Gus Van Sant on a number of projects, including a film version of Sarah.
—Cooper Cruz
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2001.