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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm bent to N'awlins, which is twisted my way.", November 20, 2005
In Eureka, Mississippi, the people are hardy, tough, used to heat, dust and drought, where "needles fare better than leaves". His "genes knitted from rainbow yarns", the light-skinned, mixed-race Leifur Nils Kristjansson Saint Marie du Cotton is born in 1950, Lee Cotton for short. Recessive genes render this southern child a confusing mix, "with buttermilk skin, azure blue eyes and straw-blonde hair". If his color, or lack of, doesn't get him into sufficient trouble, the voices he hears finish confuse him even more. Like his maternal grandmother, Lee is conversant with the spirits, living and dead, their cacophony joined with others in the all-black classroom he attends, making it all but impossible to attend to his lessons. Even in his youth, Lee intuits that his life will never be easy, part black, part white, and nowhere at home.
The future holds some hard knocks for Lee, as he is drawn to dangerous places, his skin color purchasing easy but dangerous passage. The spirit voices encourage his innocent curiosity, but the world is unforgiving, opportunistic and wasteful. Falling in love with the beautiful daughter of a rabid racist, Lee comes close to meeting his Maker, later to pass for white and gain employment in St. Louis, later still to assume yet another identity in San Francisco. Lee's road takes him far beyond the borders of normalcy, even to Nevada as a member of a secret psy-ops team, damaged but determined. This gender-bending tale of one man's changing identity would be grotesque if not for Wilson's humorous and brutally honest prose. From civil rights to Vietnam to feminism, Lee spins from one drama to another, that light-skinned, blonde-haired boy far from home when he pays a final visit home, adding another twist to an already addled past.
This is the South with all its pettiness and prejudices, brutality hiding behind a friendly smile, a man's hand as ready to stab as to shake, general meanness as common as a charm to ward off evil spirits. But these are Lee's people, the good, the bad and the ugly. Born into a world that does not easily accommodate him, Lee confronts every situation with a willingness to survive. Life is not a box of chocolates, nor is his existence simple, but this character has an unquenchable spirit, gripping a gris-gris in his fist as he marches into obstacles that would throw a lesser spirit. Adventure, romp, expose and debacle, the author's imagination conjures up a transcendental man with angelic pretensions, straddling the best and the worst of humanity. On the surface, this skin-color-sexual-orientation-morphing protagonist is patently absurd, but the story is written with such open-mindedness and good humor that it is hard to ignore the very real issues of racism, sexism and life from an ever-changing perspective. Luan Gaines/ 2005.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who is the real McCoy?, January 5, 2006
The title character of Christopher Wilson's second novel begins life as a blonde, white, blue-eyed boy born of a black mother. Lee Cotton's problems are compounded by another oddity, his ability to hear the thoughts of both the living and the dead. If that were not enough, Lee discovers that his life holds surprising, even shocking, turns that ensure he will never fit in anywhere. First he survives a brutal, racially motivated assault that leaves him a John Doe, assumed to be white, in a neurological ward, and then, through a series of events, he undergoes major transformations that always leave him different on the outside than on the inside. No matter what guise he assumes, he remains an honest, homespun, good-humored, observant individual--a cross between Forest Gump and Cal from Eugenides's Middlesex. As one character says, "'You're inchoate, Lee. You're plastic; you're protean. What happens next?'"
Lee Cotton, rechristened along the way as Lee McCoy, is a misfit with a down-home attitude who has no idea who or what he is, although he doesn't seem to care much. Some of the other characters are as outrageous as Lee himself: self-destructive Angel who undergoes her own transformations, always one step beyond Lee's; time-traveler Ethan who claims "you can live as many lives as you like, all at once, in parallel"; shrewd reporter and lesbian Fay who wants more than anything to be loved, just once; Angel's father Byron who remains a steadfast bigot despite all the lessons he should have learned; Doc, a mechanic and once famous surgeon who now performs illegal surgery in the back room of a local bar; and grandmother Celeste, a wealthy woman from "N'awlins" who practices voodoo and who later talks to Lee from beyond the grave. The characters, with all their exaggerated qualities, fit well with the tone of the novel, for Wilson is not interested in realism but in theme: no one really belongs in his own world.
At times Wilson stretches the reader's patience with his outlandish plot twists; the sections where the reader must adjust along with Lee to a new reality often cause the narrative to founder. Fortunately for the reader, each time Wilson manages to find his way back to the right balance between character and content through Lee's first person narration and sensibilities which provide an anchor for the reader. Lee's voice ensures continuity even if the narrative details do not. By the novel's end, the reader learns why Lee has undergone these trials, although the somewhat hokey explanation, not entirely unexpected, falls flat because of the shift from the delightful bizarre to a pat inspirational message. Despite the flaws, Cotton remains an inventive and memorable novel precisely because it is so over-the-top. -- Debbie Lee Wesselmann
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing main character and plot., May 1, 2006
This was a very interesting read. The main character, Lee, undergoes several transformations throughout the course of the book. Indeed, it's rather difficult to describe the plot without giving too much of it away. Suffice it to say that this book turned into an unlikely page turner. I highly recommend it in lieu of popular NYT bestseller-type dribble.
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