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.