THE HEART IS DECIETFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS

I normally don't review books, given my background in porno and the perceived bias it carries, as well as the penchant most literary reviewers have for overlooking critical passages and focusing on mundane or misinterpreted text. With J.T. LeRoy's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, I had to make an exception. Damn all convention.

First, a little bio on our boy wonder genius writer, if you please. It is my understanding, gleaned largely from interviews read in Salon, XY Magazine, and elsewhere in contemporary media culture, that much of what is written in The Heart is autobiographical. That means that not only was LeRoy subjected to mental and physical cruelty beyond the scope of imagining as a child, but he also attempted to be a woman most of his life.

The Heart chronicles his story, the story of a boy named Jeremiah, who is taken from foster care at the age of four by his newly eighteen year old mother, and paraded across the country in a beat up Datsun. Along the way we meet his grandfather, a preacher who forces his children to scrub their skin with scalding hot water and bleach and vigorously clean their genitals with a wire brush. We also meet his mother, Sarah, who works as a lot lizard for a while in between her sugar daddy boyfriend and her speed dealing boyfriend that blows up the house and melts his eyelids off. What's a lot lizard you ask? Oh, I'm sorry. That's a prostitute who turns tricks in a parking lot full of truck drivers. While staying there, in the parking lot, Jeremiah meets a twelve-year-old prostitute named Milkshake, whose mother is a crackwhore, and learns the do's and don'ts of tricking truck stop style. He never gets his chance to try out being a lizard himself, but reminiscent of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, his mother teaches him to dress like her and he eventually steals one of her boyfriends who tears his ass open so badly he has to go to the hospital. There is so much good stuff in this book, so much real horror and angst, done to a child, in the worst of possible ways that you will be unable to put it down.

Offsetting and accentuating this unrelenting assault of tragic and life-shattering episodes is the beautiful prose and idiomatic feeling. At one point he speaks his mother's name aloud and describes the magical, shaman-like affect it has on him.

"I say it softly like a magic word you use only when severely outnumbered."

In another passage he intersperses the image of birds eating his insides out with the police at the hospital demanding to know the identity of his rapist, who is in fact his mother's newly ditched husband. Always present there in his writing, just beneath the surface of the ordinary, you fin an electrical current, biting into you, sickening you, and yet, demanding that you see this novel through. I read the whole thing in two sittings - just under twelve hours - then started reading it again. If you have a strong enough stomach, you might finish this book in similar time. Definitely buy this book, read it, then burn it, but you won't be able to get the images out of your head. I promise. Even considering my background.