The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by J.T. LeRoyD. Quentin Miller
J. T. LeRoy. The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things. Bloomsbury, 2001. 247 pp. $23.95.
It’s rare to be shocked, especially by a work of fiction, in an age of violent spectacle, when revolting images are as close as a few clicks of a remote or a mouse. J. T. LeRoy’s collection of related stories is a tale of relentless torture from the point of view of an abused child who becomes a masochistic teenager. LeRoy writes with such honesty and authority about the subject that we have to believe him, even though these stories are so grotesque as to be unbelievable. They are desperate cries from darkest corners of the American landscape, painful howls from places that undoubtedly exist but seem the product of a madman’s imagination. The two recurrent characters in this landscape are the narrator, Jeremiah, and his mother, Sarah, a shiftless, addicted prostitute whose maternal abuse is her only consistent quality. She torments her son to the point that he becomes completely passive. Even though Jeremiah is abused by almost everyone in the book, there is a sense of relief every time Sarah abandons him. What makes Jeremiah so unusual is that he genuinely loves his mother, though it is a desperate and irrational love, and this interplay of emotions adds considerable depth to the stories.With the shocking horror of Bret Easton Ellis and the penetrating gaze of Louise Erdrich, LeRoy succeeds in writing a book so gripping that it’s difficult to put down, yet so disturbing that it is equally difficult to keep reading. The most successful stories deal with situations just outside of conventional experience-a mother forcefully reclaiming her child from his foster parents or the lives of truck-stop prostitutes. The less convincing stories are more sensational, such as Sarah’s descent into the insane belief that coal is going to take over the world. The dominant note of systematic and relentless abuse of a child growing into a profoundly damaged adult is what will stay with the reader. This theme is rendered so accurately and so poignantly that it has the power to unsettle, if not destroy, complacency. [D. Quentin Miller]