Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake [Hardcover]

James McCourt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2002

The beyond-great Hollywood star returns in seven pyrotechnic tales that become—somehow—a family saga spread over seventeen years.

Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake encompasses friends, relations, and some passersby—as James McCourt cocks a cast eye on the seven deadly sins. Some samples . . .

In a story evoking pride, fountainhead of the other deadly sins, Hollywood star Kaye Wayfaring, semiretired now atop the Silver Lake Hills, like Marion Davis at San Simeon, is at home during the 1984 Olympics, contemplating the translucent Norma Jean (“Nobody ever went at lines the way she did”), while over at the studio, her colleagues review the highlights of her career, culminating in her scandalous, headline-grabbing Oscar snub.

Lust is represented by Kaye, now back in business on location in Ireland, starring as the wanton Irish pirate queen, Granuaile. Kaye is sheathed in the part, waiting for the light, in County Donegal, balancing visions of sacred and profane love, during the first (and always lustful) day of principal photography.

Gluttony is personified by Kaye Wayfaring’s son, Tristan, in the throes of adolescent meltdown, telling his beloved uncle the demented tale of his cross-country bus trip, forced landing, and rescue by south-of-L.A. beach bums, as he floats in and out of consciousness.

And sin itself, as in “sinfully delicious,” is exemplified by James McCourt’s new book, Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, from beginning to end.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McCourt's latest collection, though funny and smart enough for two books, falls short of gratification. It revisits the life of Kaye Wayfaring, an aging movie star (and recurring character in McCourt's work) who lives in Los Angeles's tony Silver Lake neighborhood. Wayfaring's true career is a thing of the past, but she still appears in music videos and popular movies. These seven tales all chronicle some form of inner epiphany, each one bound up with one of the seven deadly sins. The stories are largely composed of highly poeticized dialogue, in which characters speak in cutting witticisms about movie stars, religious movements, philosophy, politics and an all-you-can-eat buffet of other subjects. McCourt's perpetual speculation is intellectually engaging, but the book lacks the force of his earlier work the stories' inner discoveries are not monumental enough to fully take hold. In the title story, focusing on Pride, Wayfaring watches a house next door slowly being torn down as she reflects on how a lost nomination for an Oscar dealt a blow to her career. "In Tir na nOg (Covetousness)" reveals Wayfaring gorging on chocolates, trying to forget that she will never be as charming as "Norma Jean." In "Ense¤ada (Anger)," Wayfaring goes to a costume party dressed as an Irish war goddess with three heads and then tears a Marilyn Monroe mask off another partygoer and tosses it into a fireplace. The explosions that occur in this collection are Chekhovian in their subtlety, masked in a layer of craft so thick that it is often hard to see what lies beneath.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

After skewering Clinton-era Washington in Delancey's Way (2000), McCourt, stylistically rambunctious and metaphysically inclined, descends on 1980s Hollywood and rejoins diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (the subject of his first novel) and movie star Kaye Wayfaring, Mawrdew's daughter-in-law, mother of twins, and the focus of an earlier short story collection. In this set of interlocking tales, each a droll riff on one of the seven deadly sins, Kaye, who misses her dear, departed friend, Marilyn Monroe, has just flummoxed everyone by appearing in a wildly successful rock video and is now working on a movie about an Irish pirate queen. Such story elements are deeply embedded within a fizzing hubbub of witty conversations spiked with Hollywood trivia and mysticism that morphs into jousts, reminiscences, and philosophical disputations to form a scintillating montage not unlike those of novelist Paul West. As for McCourt, all his canniness and irony can't conceal his love for Hollywood and its obsessions. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (June 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394523628
• ISBN-13: 978-0394523620
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,377,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant But Difficult, May 12, 2011

By 

Bruce Frier (Ann Arbor, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake (Hardcover)

Kaye Wayfaring we first met in "Kay Wayfaring in 'Avenged'" (1985) -- like this book, a collection of linked stories centering on a Hollywood star who, in this book, has become a bit of a recluse. The style is magical, almost hallucinatory at times. However, as another review in this section will suggest, not everyone will get it. It helps to know Hollywood, of course; and McCourt has a deep sense of the entire place.

Although McCourt's sensibility is deeply gay, sexual orientation figures only slightly in this book, which, like many of McCourt's novels, is mainly preoccupied with the transitory world of opera or show biz.

McCourt has long been known as a gifted writer, and justifiably so. But if you haven't read him yet, this book is probably not the place to start.

0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad, July 29, 2009

By 

Cosmoetica "cosmoeticadotcom" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake (Hardcover)

James McCourt is one of those writers who seems to have gotten in print via connections, and the fact that he is a `gay writer'. I say this because it is the only discernible reason available given his actual writing ability. That said, I had to Google him to find out that he is a `gay writer', for, thankfully, although he has many ills as a writer, a predilection for masturbation, fellatio, and 69ing, does not infect every tale in this book, as it too often does the work of gay writers like David Leavitt. Yet, he is not a good writer, but a bad one, regardless of his sexual predilection. Is he the worst writer who's ever been published? Certainly not, and with bottom feeders like a Nikki Giovanni, Dave Eggers, and a host of other Chick Literatistas around, he's probably not even near the Bottom 100.

However, that doesn't mean that his bad writing should have found print. Wayfaring At Waverly In Silver Lake is a short story collection, inexplicably published in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf- a publisher that used to put into print really good literature but has, as all presses, big and small, seem to have, given in to cranking out crap for its Lowest Common Denominator bottom line. The book is built around the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Envy, Gluttony, and Sloth. Certainly this is not a bad premise for a book, as many short story collections these days are centered around themes or places. The problem lies in the execution, and the fact that the stories are not really about sin. Worse, the claimed leading sins of each tale are not necessarily the ones that take center stage in each tale- for example, the tale on Gluttony has more fornication than the tale on Lust. Whether this was poor designation or McCourt's way of trying to intimate that all sin is the same I do not know. What I do know is that it does not work, nor does any single tale rise to a level of being deserving of print.