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Summary: The Mozart of contemporary American literature
Review: Most writers of self-consciously "literary" fiction are people who are widely read but narrowly experienced. Things could be worse, of course: most writers of genre fiction are simply morons, hard-working morons, but morons nontheless. Occasionally, however, a young person comes along whom fate puts through the ringer--repeatedly, and while he or she is very young--and then, by some miracle, this person comes through the experience intact, and has an inborn genius for language to boot. JT Leroy is one such person.Leroy is not widely read, but it doesn't matter. His ear has registered enough voices to sustain a lifetime's career. His sentences have a lilting, feminine cadence, and are shot through with beauty, desire, pain, and humor. But nothing is overdone, nothing is arch or self-conscious or heavy-handed, everything is inviting, mysterious, and deeply humane. His language and his atmosphere are thoroughly haunting. He puts his characters through the ringer, just as he once was, but in so doing he shows (and is himself an example of) the indestructability of human goodness. "Sarah" sketches a world at the margins of society, of civilization even, and slowly, slowly begins to show us that that is where we all live. He was only 20 when he wrote this. Forget the other 20-something poseurs who get licked up by the New Yorker for their pitiful concoctions pasted together from the styles of other writers. This is the real stuff. This is the one and only Mozart of contemporary American literature.
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Summary: What a BOOK!!
Review: As horrifing as the story was, the book was written with such delicacy and raw human touch that I raced home every day to read it-
It really is a MUST READ! you will not be let down.
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Summary: Wonderful, Horrible, Awful, Beautiful
Review: With simplistic language underpinned by clever subtleties, Sarah keeps you interested without wearing you out. This book is not for everyone--it will shock some and bore others. Some will find it beautiful, others grotesque. In any case, it is so easy to read, it's worth it for the experience either way. If you end up not liking it, you won't have wasted much time. Personally, I enjoyed Sarah. It was not nearly as shocking as I'd anticipated from some reviews, and it proved to certainly NOT just be a piece of "shock literature" as some readers suggested. Leroy straddles a line between humor and horror that leaves you unsure if you want to wince or giggle. And like the skilled prostitutes he describes in the book, Leroy milks those wonderfully agonizing edges for all they're worth, keeping closure of the moment ever out of reach. If nothing else, I recommend this book just as an experience. No matter if you mix well with it or not, you will take something from it.
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Summary: Way Over-Hyped
Review: I wanted to believe all the hype behind this novel, but sadly the hype didn't live up to what was a fairly explotive, sensational novel. There are a few well-written and fine moments, though overall I found Sarah to be somewhat silly and immature. My hope is that the story collection is stronger, because this one barely slid in under the self-important radar.
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Summary: A Good Man is Hard to Find
Review: John Kennedy O'toole, Flannery O'Conner, maybe even Erskine Caldwell but not Burroughs. J.T. Leroy will change the way you look at truck drivers forever. They aint just whistlin' "Dixie" over in West Virginia. A powerful first novel from a true survivor- someone who can look back on the horrors of their life with humor. The amazing thing is how all the characters accept their lives as normal and how Leroy isnt looking for pity or a moral. Hilarious and sad, matter of fact insanity. Read it one sitting, couldnt put it down.
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Summary: the emperior has no clothes
Review: Reviews of this book were gushing with applause. It was mostly dull, and pretty preposterous. We are left believing every trucker in the country is gay or really kinky. Nothing of any value in this book. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Summary: Definitely a good read.
Review: JT LeRoy received so much high acclaim that I felt I just had to buy this book. On the cover there are quotes by well-known people who compare LeRoy to the likes of Burroughs, etc. So the standard is set very high, I think.... Consindering this publication "only" has 166 pages, it is quite something that I did not fully get into it until around page 100... And even after having finished it I am not totally sure what to think of this book - but I can recommend it nevertheless. JT LeRoy describes life of a male teenage prostitute. He also talks about Sarah, his mother. What I liked about the book is the way it made my brains work - Sarah could be the mother, but could also be an alter ego, sort of schizophrenic. JT shows the ugly side of the prostitution trade, but at the same time makes religious comparisons, talks about a certain holiness of the business.
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Summary: A major -- if undisciplined -- talent
Review: There is certainly a lot to recommend about 'Sarah.' LeRoy 'whether he really exists or not (and some people say he's a hoax) ' is a major young talent. His great achievement isn't to shock us with this story (...), but to make us see the beauty in his existence. I thought his writing style was breath taking, and I'll certainly buy 'The Heart is Deceitful' based on this novella. But it is a debut novel. And it has many young novelists' mistakes. Central among them is the plotting. He's latched on to some fascinating topics: the strange 'lot lizard' culture and the bizarre relationship between a hooker mother and her son. But he drops them almost immediately and sends us on a rather conventional story line involving abuse, (...) and even a truck chase. I wish he would have trusted his material more. As he becomes an older and more confident writer, I expect his novels will become more fully realized as well.
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Summary: Today's Tom Sawyer
Review: J. T. Leroy's fictional world is strangely out of joint. There is a wild west quality to both "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" and "Sarah," both apparently set in the Appalachia of the last decade, that places them on the outskirts of time. Cel phones and beepers, the staples of pimps and prostitutes, are nowhere in evidence, and would seem anachronistic if they were. The novels might just as easily have been set in the 1970s as in the 1990s. Having said that, Leroy's fictive world of horny CB'ers and the lot lizards who love them (for a price) is perfectly believable, even if it never, in fact, existed, and "Sarah," the novel under consideration, is a near-masterpiece of its type. Part Hugh Selby, part "Huckleberry Finn," and part "Prscilla, Queen of the Desert," "Sarah" nonetheless manages to defy categorization. Its most obvious parallel is to Patrick McCabe's "Breakfast on Pluto," which was criminally neglected in America; McCabe's novel tells the story of "Pussy," an Irish teenager who sets out to reinvent himself as his mother and comes up with an amalgam of Dusty Springfield's beehived stage persona and Scott Walker's "Big Louise." Set against a backdrop of politics and violence in 1970s Britain, it is perhaps a more complex novel than "Sarah," but a worthy companion to it. Of the two works by Leroy, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" tells the more affecting story, while "Sarah" is the more perfect construct. There is an almost Tom Sawyer (or is it Nancy Drew?)-like quality to Cherry Vanilla's cumpulsion to dress up in his mother's leather skirts and lipstick and to best her at her own game: prostitution. As a truck parking-lot lizard, Cherry leaves the maternal arms of one pimp to become the saint of another, who is deceived as to C. V.'s gender and who ends up exhibiting him as the reincarnation of Abraham's wife, Sarah, at a truckstop sideshow reminiscent of something out of Flannery O'Connor or, perhaps more appropriately, Charles Portis--Sarah, of course, being the narrator's mother's real name. If, as has been rumored, Gun Van Sant has optioned the screen rights to the film, he should have a field day casting the gallery of grotesques who populate the novel. In the space of a mere 166 pages (Picador edition), we are introduced to Pooh, who has second sight and who can see through the narrator's disguise; Le Loup, her pimp, who is confused by his tender regard for "Sarah"; and Laymon, who keeps pictures on his walls of little girls in frilly underwear and who is shocked to find what Sarah is hiding beneath hers. Once his masquerade is discovered, and our hero is farmed out to a low-life named Stacey as a kind of second-string, male lot lizard by Le Loup, the action shifts to a truckstop version of an old-west stagecoach rescue, with transvestites and pimps... "Sarah" is a terrrific entertainment, a one-of-a-kind adventure, that prepares the reader for the more gut-wrenching reality of "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." There are moments in "Sarah" that anticipate the pathos of "Heart," as when the narrator explains his attraction to prostitution: "I hold those moments--the tobacco and grease-stained hand lovingly caressing my throat, the lips parted in silent ecstasy, kissing my forehead like a parent placing a good-night kiss--I replay them in slow motion as if they took place with the prolonged consumed movements of someone running under water." That's writing--nay, poetry--of a tall order, and only one of many reasons to read this...first novel.
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Summary: Fluff!!
Review: After reading reviews of SARAH, I expected a poignant, interesting tale. Instead, I read a fluffy exercise in understated erotica. JT LeRoy disappoints with his middle-school longing for love and affection, found in all the wrong places, of course. His 'lizards' border on the colorful but he never fleshes them out into full characters. Wouldn't we like to know more about Pooh's sudden 'second sight'? Or what made her turn to kindness in the end? Or dive into Pie's oriental geisha pysche? Learn some of Sundae's cheers? I felt as if the story was an old one retold with little insight or creativity. Sarah goes looking for acceptance, love, belonging; ends up in a horrible place, not knowing quite how she got there, (duh!); returns home to find that she could have had love there all along (click your heels three times, 'there's no place like home')but has forfeited that love with her desires to get the 'biggest bone'. In the end, I'm glad the farce didn't go on for too many pages because I only wasted one night sifting through marshmallows, looking for something more substantial.
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