Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Camping in Washington
By Garry Wills
Delancey's Way
by James McCourt
Knopf, 369 pp., $25.00
James McCourt's first novel was Mawrdew Czgowchwz, a camp masterpiece about opera fanatics. His second was a tour de force combination of the sentimental and the slapstick, Time Remaining, in which the survivors of a group of gay men, the 'Eleven Against Heaven,' mourn and celebrate their flamboyant comrades dead of AIDS. For that novel McCourt invented a quiet narrator, Delancey, whose steady relationship with (the mainly invisible) Phil makes him partly an outsider observing the wilder erotic adventures of his transvestite friends. In order to honor the dead, he becomes a performance artist, but his tribute to their memory is never described, since it cannot compete with the lurid and eloquent Joycean monologue he listens to from 'Odette T. O'Doyle,' a transvestite Irish Catholic, which fills the last half of the novel. The manic chatter of McCourt's first novel is sustained—'My life has become so private, I have trouble getting into it'—defiant and inspired, and thrown against the dark advance of AIDS.
Review, 1702 words
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