Delancey's Way

Delancey's Way is not easy to read, filled as it is with sly allusion; you often feel like a last-minute guest at a party where everybody else knows one another and you know nobody. (You know the kind of party I mean.) To some extent you just have to roll with the punches, even when you can't see them land. Still, I found this book dazzling from start to finish. It's a slow read, too. But James McCourt shines a most peculiar light on a most peculiar town, and the results are extraordinary. It had never occurred to me before that the Washington scene cries out for an extended commentary by a drag queen; you see Clinton, Delancey's hero Gore, and the House Republicans in a wholly new way. This novel is terrific fun. It's no wonder that McCourt's "cult following" includes some of the most literate people in America.

The subtitle of this book is "a debriefing," a punning alert to the fact that James McCourt's mind runs along multiple tracks (and never along the shortest distance between two points). In his first novel since 1993's magnificent elegy for the season of AIDS, Time Remaining, McCourt has moved from (usually) sexual politics to politics as usual (and for the most part sexual). Joining such established characters in his fictional/factual oeuvre as narrator Delancey (just one name, like Falconetti or Farinelli), drag philosophe Odette (ne Danny) O'Doyle and diva Vanna Sprezza are some newcomers: Ornette, a gay politicized African-American half in love with the legend of Billy Strayhorn; Anastasia Harrington, an 80s airhead turned DC hostess with the mostest; John Galt (yes, Ayn Rand's wet-cardboard creature), a Senator from the ridge where the West commences; and his exotic page/protege (soon to become his spousal equivalent) Rain, who may or may not be a Shoshone Indian. What there is of a plot recedes into the mists of Foggy Bottom, leaving the foreground open for McCourt's dazzling carnival of allusions, witticisms and trenchant verities. (Who else remembers that "Tangerine" wafted through the windows in Double Indemnity's lethal last encounter?) Ostensibly the chronicle of a campaign to save the piping plover, Delancey's Way is a pungent reverie on the bantam-rooster puffery of the mid-90s Republican "revolution" (McCourt's chapter titles parody the months of the French revolutionary calendar: "Aperture," "Arpege," "Terminal"). Though it's a distillation of just about every book and movie ever made about the American capital (and Capitol), Delancey's Way jettisons all formulas, leaving the acrid McCourt smoke in its spreading wake. Connoisseurs -- of both Washington and of high-strung writing -- will find it toothsome but deadly fun.