Nom de Plume

I was feeling rather vindicated when I googled “underrated novels” and ended up on this article that cited both Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and Calvin Baker’s Dominion right off the bat. And while I ended up getting a whole bunch of other books that I haven’t read off that list, I have one to add: Christopher Wilson’s The Ballad of Lee Cotton.

I picked this up in Powell’s having run out of everything else on our camping trip. It looked interesting. Hoo boy. You don’t know the half of it. I was riveted until three in the morning, huddled in my sleeping bag with the Petzl on my head. Why, oh WHY isn’t this better known? Why aren’t all the reviewers singing its praise? Seriously this is up there with The Last Samurai and Transmission and all those other wonderful, unforgettable novels that make whatever is on the New York Times Reviling of Books pale in comparison.

So. Lee Cotton is born to a black mother and an Icelandic father. He looks white. I mean, really white. Which is a problem in the South, pre-Civil Rights. But that’s not all of it because he can hear what people are thinking without them saying a word. He hears voices, a gift he gets from his obeah grandmother who lives in New Orleans. But he manages to get by–until he starts rolling around in the hay with a white girl whose father just happens to be the most rabid Klan member around. Who finds him out. Who beats him up and throws what he thinks is a dead body into a railroad car, which takes him to a hospital in a large city.
Where of course he passes as white, and thus starts a new chapter in his life. And this is just the beginning of Lee Cotton’s story, and of his many transformations into Lee McCoy (as in “the real McCoy”).

Part Zelig, part John Irving at his most wonderfully weird, and really, probably the best novel I’ve read this year, this is a rollicking story that is seriously clever. I loved it.

There are some books that become inextricably linked with a time or a place, and even looking at the spare cover (with the Today’s Book Club logo on it that almost dissuaded me from reading it entirely) makes me think of our Oregon trip and camping next to a peaceful lake in the pine trees. Ahh, those halcyon days. Wait a minute–oh, yes, that was the site where we had the generator on one side and three full generations of alcoholics on the other who only shut up after they lost and rediscovered their car keys twice and the camp host came over thrice.

But anyway.

The Schwartzes live in Bellwether, Connecticut, a place that is exactly as it sounds: staunchly middle class, white, relatively affluent. But underneath all this perfection, of course, lurks something else (insert Jaws music). Bernard, the father is ineffectual and clinically depressed–if affable–after his wife leaves him and moves to California. Chris and Cathy, the two children, muddle along until Bernard combines pills and ends up in a coma. No one knows how to deal with it. And so they don’t–even when Bernard awakens with the mind and motor skills of a child.

This was an odd novel. I liked it. It certainly wasn’t one of those blend-into-the-rest-of-them sorts of books. I could say that it represents the breakup of the American nuclear family, or turns the Holden Caulfiend coming-of-age on its head, or even that it’s about the never-ending ability of Americans to remake themselves. And while none of these are false, what really makes this book is the fact that Sharpe manages to convey all the heartbreak of the Schwartz family without ever losing his sense of humor or irony.

As the queen of procrastination, I naturally picked up this jaunty orange-colored book thinking it would be a witty romp through the hours of the day. And it’s certainly a romp through the hours, but, well, there’s no way to say this nicely, so I’ll just say it: It’s just not that witty. Or funny. Or even that interesting, to be brutally honest. Sure, Hodgkinson makes some interesting points and observations (among them some admittedly pithy observations about daytime vampires), and backs everything up with quotes from other, more famous loafers. But ultimately, I abandoned this. After all, if I need lessons in idleness (which let’s face it, I don’t), I have a much better role model.

Well hello …