the other press

Culture

 

Paparazzi:

Campus Characters

september 25, 2002

 

Name: Artemio

Age: Undisclosed

Status: Single

Program of Study: General Studies
What are you wearing? Jeans by
American Eagle, (shoes) Kicks by Duffs,
and toque by Phoenix.

What do you want to be when you grow
up? “no clue.” He’s okay with that and
so are we.

 

 

 

Age: 23

Name: Kristie

Status: Single

Program of Study: General Studies

What are you wearing? Jeans by Hype n
Glory, shirt by American Eagle, bag and
shoes from Aldo.

What do you want to be when you grow
up? An investigator, a private investigator.
Or maybe she’s still investigating that. Ask
her when you see her.

 

 

the heart is deceitful above all things

 

Everyone is reading JT LeRoy. He is
the darling of the hip and fashionable,
a millennial pop culture figure of
Warholian proportions and heralded
as a modern-day Voltaire. Some peo-
ple think he is really a woman, others
think he/she is a charlatan duping the
art-hungry glitterati. But LeRoy is liv-
ing proof there is no bad press. His
debut novel, written when he was 16,
is an autobiography titled Sarah. It
was released in 2000 to great critical
acclaim and is being made into a Gus
Van Sant film. In 2001, Le Roy,
then 21, released The Heart is
Deceitful Above All Things, also to

critical acclaim.

J.ALL.
Assistant Culture Editor

I held off reading either of the nov-
els waiting for what I considered the
flavour of the month to disappear
off the literary radar. That didn’t
happen. Instead I read one rave
review after another, and then when
I discovered that Dave Eggers (one
of my favourite authors) was cham-
pioning LeRoy—I bit.

After reading his work I am quite
embarrassed that it took my crush
on Eggers to motivate me to pick up
two of the most stunning novels I
have ever read. I won't go into Sarah
much, other than to say it is great and
I recommend you read it before you
tackle The Heart. And believe me, a
little preparation will be in order.

I started reading The Heart on the
Skytrain, and I almost threw up. The
novel is a series of autobiographical
stories about a boy named Jeremiah
and his mother Sarah. In the first
story, Jeremiah is taken from his
happy, healthy foster home to be
returned to his 18-year-old birth
mother. She is a cruel product of
violence who parades her son across
America, feeding him speed and

Book Review
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things - JT LeRoy

allowing him to be beaten by her
numerous “boyfriends”. We watch as
Jeremiah changes from a happy, well-
adjusted four-year-old into a casualty
of rabid abuse so sadistic, it is often
hard to accept. Some of the scenes are
so horrifying I had to hold my hand
over my mouth to keep from crying
aloud.

One passage in particular nearly
killed me. Jeremiah has been relin-
quished to sleep in the bathtub of a
seedy hotel while his mother has sex
with a truck driver in the other room.
Terrified, the boy wets himself and
soils the truck driver's pillows. In the
morning Sarah comes in to void her
bladder and becomes irritated when
her son stares at her. After wadding up
wet toilet paper to clean herself she
throws it at Jeremiah where it splatters
and sticks to his bare chest. This is fol-
lowed by the boy being beaten by the
truck driver, who muffles Jeremiah’s
screams by stuffing a semen-covered
sheet into the boy’s mouth.

It is nearly unbearable to read
and this isn’t the worst; I haven't
even hit the rape scene and the

preacher/grandfather who forces the
child to wash his genitals in scalding
water and bleach. Remember, this is
the first of ten stories about Jeremiah,
Sarah and a cast of hateful characters.
Throughout the novel, LeRoy man-
ages to grip his reader, guiding us
through your revulsion with his beau-
tiful prose and even, at times, his sense
of humour.

Although this book has been out for
a year, it demands to be reviewed and
revisited often. I read this book in one
sitting, often wanting to throw it
across the room in hopes of exorcising
some of the brutality from my mind. I
never managed to let it go from arm's
length, realizing that I would never be
able to rid my mind of the images
LeRoy had so brilliantly planted there.

Regardless of what your feelings
may be about JT LeRoy, The Heart is
Deceitful Above All Things is a book
worth reading. It will make you feel
something, though you may not like
the sensation.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All
Things has recently been released in

paperback.
page 13 ©