In his introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of his own earliest short stories, Thomas Pynchon wrote that "it is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too." Pynchon, by then a seasoned writer, could look with embarrassment and sufficient distance at these stories of his youth and not feel threatened when calling them bad. Upon reading them, however, the stories which he introduced as "pretentious, goofy, and ill-considered" were actually surprisingly good and always interesting.
It may not be fair to call The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things J.T. LeRoy's Slow Learner. At first, they seem to be altogether different. Pynchon's early works are forced and literary, conscious of themselves and wanting to be understood through their filtered webs of symbolism. LeRoy's are brutal and heartfelt, as if it didn't really matter, during the process of writing, if anyone ever read them. And if they did, then too bad: these tales weren't made for fun, nor were they always invented.
Sometimes age does matter too. Pynchon's apprentice collection appeared as the author waned into middle age. When LeRoy's came out, during the summer of 2001, the author was only 21. When he first wrote many of them, he was in his mid-teens.
But there's more of a link between these two collections than the reluctance of each to reveal themselves in public LeRoy has granted only one photo shoot, for Vanity Fair, but he was wearing a tutu and mask. For both, these collections are marketed as confessions: They're not the best work of their writers, but they are revelations of these writers' personalities.
"It really came about without the idea that it would be seen by anybody," - LeRoy said about Heart by phone. "For me it was just for my therapist, Terrence Owens, or for my therapist's class. I really didn't have the feeling of anyone looking over my shoulder like I do now."
LeRoy began writing his stories of abandonment and punishment for therapeutic purposes and also for the academy. His therapist, Dr. Terrence Owens, wanted the stories to be used so that graduate students of a psychiatry program in northern California could better understand the kind of painful childhood that people like J.T. LeRoy had to go through. LeRoy soon found writer friends and from them found a new history of literature to work out of, but there were many steps before he could get to creating a novel.
"I just really didn't feel I was ready," he said. "I didn't want to have it, the books, come out and just be about my sob story and I really feel that was the marketing they were going for. Not Bloomsbury, I was at Crown at the time. And so it really kind of scared me and I basically quit writing."
Eventually LeRoy's huge splash of a debut novel, Sarah, finally appeared. The stories of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things all preceded this novel, but the later examples, like "Meteors," were part of the transition. "Meteors," more than the other stories, had found the irony that could never have come out of the painful stories of his Owens period, even if the themes emerged from the same biography. "I really saw the power of humor," said LeRoy, "and also craft." Soon the short novella about a boy - or girl - named Sarah became the novel that is now being made into a Gus Van Sant movie, inspiring Garbage songs, and generally making a ruckus. It was grounded in LeRoy's painful history but sprinkled with bouts of fantasy and beautiful fiction, telling a traditional adventure formula picaresque about an unconventional hero in lot lizard West Virginia. Lot lizards, for those who haven't caught on yet, are slang for truck stop whores.
It will take a lot to beat Sarah, but J.T. LeRoy doesn't like the idea of expectations. Is Heart "an exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers," as Edward Mendelson wrote of Pynchon's Slow Learner in 1984? No, probably not. If it weren't for LeRoy's natural ease in lyric writing, only masochists could call these stories exhilarating. But in the end they are, even if they weren't dedicated for the reading public anyway. Sarah was. Even if J.T. never writes another great novel, we should be happy just to have the one we do and recognize these short stories as the skeleton that helped create the body of Sarah.
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