Delancey’s Way

An operatic, satirical romp through (high and low) Washington — filled with politicos and pundits, divas and divine spirits — by the greatly admired author of Time Remaining and the cult classic Mawrdew Czgowchwz (“Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor, in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov” — Susan Sontag).

It opens with Delancey, a reporter for the East Hampton Star, being sent to cover the environmental budget wars of the 104th Congress, his copy of Henry Adams’s Democracy in hand, for background on the farrago called overnment. It introduces us to le tout de Washington: the socialite (and exiled eighties New York party girl) Anastasia Harrington (a.k.a. Bam-Bam) and her billionaire husband, Max; a senator obsessed with the fall of the republic and with his rogue companion, an ex-hustler and congressional phone-sex virtuoso; the semiretired transvestite ballerina Odette O’Doyle and the diva (operatic and otherwise) Vana Sprezza; and Delancey’s new friend, Ornette, a living antidote to the racism of our times, who sympathizes with the sexually profligate President (lovingly referred to as POTUS).

From Delancey’s trip on the Metroliner where it all begins, to a drink-soaked escapade in Key West, to soirees at the Harringtons’ and the Cosmos Club, to the grand finale (an uproarious Venetian bal masqué at the Library of Congress), McCourt shows us the pyrotechnic power plays of the nineties, eerily parallel to (but far deadlier than) those portrayed in Adams’s chronicle of earlier times. Here is Washington as it should be seen — upside down, and inside right.