In this election year of "Settle for Hillary" vs. "The Orange Baboon Who Doesn't Pay Taxes " (credit: Paul Rudnick ), Out There finds it helpful to remember that there have been figures in American political life who have been truly inspiring to us. At the top of that list has always been Eleanor Roosevelt , the original template for a First Lady who gives a damn about social justice and uses her position to get things done.
OT owns two volumes of Blanche Wiesen Cook's definitive ER biography, and coming in November is "Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962," from Viking. Meanwhile we have a new book that tackles head-on ER's famous love affair with AP reporter Lorena Hickok. "Eleanor and Hick - The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady" by Susan Quinn has just been published by Penguin Press.
From the time Hickok was assigned to cover ER during her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first presidential campaign, on through to Eleanor's death, the two had a 30-year relationship that encompassed "lovers, confidantes, professional advisers, and caring friends. For 13 years, Hickok had her own room at the White House, next to the First Lady's." The book's modest offering of black & white photographs includes one of "Hick," as she was known, on assignment for the Minneapolis Tribune, climbing aboard the locomotive Old Lady 501 dressed in a butch pair of engineer's overalls. She embodies every stereotype of old-school lesbian you can imagine. These were two women who were clearly made for each other.
Hick got Eleanor to keep a diary that eventually became her own newspaper column, "My Day." The bosom buddies also wrote over 3,000 letters to each other, in which both wrote that they "ached" for each other. Some of that torrid correspondence is reproduced here. They channeled their ardor into actively working to make the world a better place. Quinn's book reminds us of the strength of their love.
Bird Call
OT has ample access to advance copies of newly published books, but sometimes we have to catch up with literary sensations of seasons past. That's the case with "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt, which made quite a splash upon its publication in 2013 and deservedly won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. We only dove into the sea of its 771 pages this month, then could not put it down until we'd swum it.
Tartt is one of those natural-born writers who seemed to emerge fully formed from the womb. Her debut fiction "The Secret History" (1992) is one of the great all-time college novels, and "The Goldfinch" is one of the great bildungsromans. Its initial passages, after a short framing device, are a difficult entry: 13-year-old Theo is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his most beloved mom when a terrorist bomb goes off. Amid fully described carnage and mayhem, his mother is killed. Theo saves the Dutch masterpiece of the title, then walks off with it.
Though mostly set in NYC, shades of Wharton and Salinger, there is a big middle section set in decadent desolation in exurban Las Vegas, where Theo meets Boris, a Russian-Ukrainian refugee and a beautifully drawn rogue. Though not a gay novel, "The Goldfinch" does nod to brief erotic interludes between the two delinquent teens. There's even a tender passage when they part, when Theo realizes that what he feels for Boris is love.
"The Goldfinch" is one of those long, lived-in novels you can swing a cat around in. Among other themes, it explores love, loss, grief, drug abuse, criminality, parenting, male bonding, art history, furniture restoration, connoisseurship, class divides, suburban dystopia and urban angst. It's a hugely satisfying read.
Hoax Memories
The current release of "Author: The JT LeRoy Story" prompted a reader to remind us that OT was prescient in our indignant Laura Albert outrage. From Out There, 1/5/2006:
"One fun thing about the year just passed was the SF-based JT LeRoy literary hoax that splattered in the faces of various litero establishments and personages like an egg souffle gone terribly wrong.
"Why do such hoaxes so typically arise in SF? You have to admire an enterprise that can single-handedly sucker novelists popular (Armistead Maupin of The Night Listener) and transgressive (Dennis Cooper of The Sluts). Apparently 'Speedie' was quite speedy enough to bamboozle celebrated queer authors across generations and aesthetics, whether masquerading as 'Terminator ' or, oh, underage. In L'Affair LeRoy, we suspect Cooper knows more than he lets on.
"Is the poor old Dowager Madam (that's San Francisco, for those readers just joining us from home) so desperate for a literati with gravitas greater than society novelists Danielle Steele or Amy Tan that she falls for even the most unlikely of candidates? Big, world-weary sigh here.
"But the nagging question about the whole scandale, then we'll shut up about it, is why, in nine long pages in New York magazine, the Real Author of all those endless columns by 'JT' for 7x7 magazine was never mentioned. Here's a big clue: It wasn't Speedie.
"Guess what, our double-deep background source implies in so many words that the 7x7 columns weren't the only ones that were ghost-written. In fact, they were just the tip of the iceberg. We suspect that initially, hoaxstress Laura Whatever just suckered the Ghost Writer for free copy-editing, one sorta desperate type leaning on another. It snowballed from there."
We'll give Cooper the last word. From his blog: "I finally saw the documentary The JT LeRoy Story that I'm interviewed in for a minute or so. I really hated it. It's a totally superficial whitewash that treats Laura Albert like she's some kind of kooky folk hero instead of as the psychopathic, destructive user that she is. I regret allowing the director to interview me for it. It put me in a really bad mood the whole weekend. Disgusting."
OT seconds that emotion.