From Publishers Weekly
LeRoy rose to considerable notoriety as the teenaged author of last year's Sarah, a novel about a gender-confused kid whose mother is a truckers' prostitute. In his latest work, a rawly written, riveting series of 10 interlocked stories that read fluidly as a novel, LeRoy returns to the themes of guilt and sin in the first-person voice of a boy so viciously abused by his caretakers that he is left with barely a sense of his own identity. Jeremiah is a child nobody wants, and he passes swiftly from foster parents to his angry and vindictive teenaged mother, Sarah, to his fanatically Evangelical grandparents. Sarah, herself badly wounded by her punishing, Bible-obsessed parents, gave birth to the boy when she was only 14; she returns at 18 to claim him. "Nobody takes what's mine," spouts the foul-mouthed, pill-popping, paranoid young woman. It's soon clear that Sarah cares nothing for her son, who becomes an unwelcome tagalong on her transient cross-country misadventures in hooking louche sugar daddies, stripping, turning tricks for truckers and cooking up explosive "crystal" in one boyfriend's cellar. The boy, who begins to crave Sarah's punishment as a way of keeping his life in balance, is frequently whipped for bed-wetting and is raped by her unsavory boyfriends; his denial of his sexuality becomes a pathetic attempt to identify with his tormentor. LeRoy depicts his ill-begotten characters as tenderly as Jean Genet, and delineates their acts of sadism and self-mutilation as unsparingly as A.M. Homes. Yet the stories resist spiraling into mere sensationalism. While Sarah becomes almost cartoonish in her savagery, the characters of the trucker child prostitute Milkshake and the lumbering biker Buddy are poignantly understated. Jeremiah, conflicted, emotionally bled but never self-pitying or defeated, elicits a gratifying sympathy. LeRoy's work is a startling achievement in his accelerating mastery of the literary form. (June)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
The stories collected in this volume by cult writer LeRoy, whose debut novel Sarah was published to critical acclaim, constitute a picaresque memoir set mainly in the urban underbelly of San Francisco. The author's challenge here is to extract something fresh from a terrain so familiar that it is a well-established microgenre, yet it's difficult to assess how well LeRoy succeeds, since one's judgment is inevitably skewed by the presentation of these stories as autobiographical. On the other hand, given how well LeRoy fulfils the ground rules of his narrative, its documentary value might be beside the point. This is the kind of work that gets described as "raw" and "honest," and while it certainly occupies a niche in the literary market, it's hard to imagine that this particular example is essential in any but the most comprehensive collections. Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
