PEARL
K.
BELL
91
It is highly appropriate that Susan Sontag has provided an enthusiastic
blurb for James McCourt's third novel,
Time Remaining.
In her famous
essay "Notes on Camp," which Sontag published in these pages in 1964,
early in her career as a cultural zeitgeister, she analyzed the nature of camp
as a unique and deviant sensibility - its extravagant, playful, anti-serious
theatricality; its disdain for moral relevance; its reliance on travesty,
impersonation, artifice; its androgynous frivolity. As she pointed out,
"Homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard - and the most ar–
ticulate audience - of Camp." In McCourt's irrepressibly campy novel,
which brings new resonance to the manner and matter of such fiction, the
dominant voice, drowning out all others, belongs to a retired female im–
personator and transvestite ballerina whose stage name was Odette
O'Doyle.
In his heyday, Odette belonged to a band of drag queens, the Eleven
Against Heaven, which for some four decades was the toast of the New
York homosexual cabaret world (the word gay had not yet suffered its
later transformation). Odette was the star of the band, and now, as he
sighs, "one of the sole survivors," for McCourt has written his campy
novel in a time that Sontag could not have foreseen - the plague years of
AIDS - a time that has enforced fearful changes in the camp sensibility.
The giggly revels of travesty and malice have been darkened by a
Totentanz with the funereal finality of a dirge, for Odette's frenetic
monologue is not only a grab-bag of gossipy remembrances of gay-dom
in the postwar, pre-HIV decades. It is also a book of the dead.
In the midnight train to the South Fork of Long Island, Odette re–
counts, among many other things, his recently completed mission on be–
half of the eight members of the Eleven Against Heaven who have died
of AIDS. Over several weeks, he crisscrossed Europe to deposit their
ashes in favorite canals and rivers and harbors, as they had requested with
their dying breath. Odette's death-haunted monologue wanders erratically
from melancholy tributes to the "faggots" (his word) whose ashes he has
just dumped, to full-throated invocations of the icons and darlings of gay
camp: Bette Davis's haughty Margo Channing in
All About Eve
(one of
Sontag's instances); Judy Garland; Mae West (a
female
female imperson–
ator); Truman Capote; scenes from dozens of B movies, with all the bits
and pieces of vanished pop culture so dear to the camp heart; lurid details
of the Windsors' sex life. And since McCourt has conceived Odette not
only as a man of parts, private and otherwise, but as an intellectual - the
drag queen as polymath - he also fires off some knowledgeable assaults on
Henry James, most contemporary poets, Jean-Paul Sartre, and decon–
struction, which he wittily dismisses as "nothing more or less than a
