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Lindy Hop to hip-hop
Advocate, The, March 14, 2006 by Regina Marler
T Cooper's cheeky and inventive second novel, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, is three-quarters immigrant family history and one-quarter expletive-laden postmodern fable of identity--from Russian pogroms to rap lyrics in 400 pages. The plot is simple at first: A Russian Jew named Esther Lipshitz arriving at Ellis Island with her family in 1907 realizes that one of her sons--an inexplicably blond boy named Reuven--is missing. He never reappears, and in time Esther comes to believe that Charles Lindbergh is her lost boy. After Esther's death, the story shifts to her great-grandson, "T Cooper" (a.k.a. Slim Lindy), a bar mitzvah DJ and Eminem impersonator who comes to terms with Esther's Lindbergh obsession.
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If this weren't disorienting enough, there's a surprise near the end that may cause whiplash in readers. "I didn't want to write a straightforward 'historical' novel about a family that comes to the U.S. from another country and 'makes it', or doesn't, or whatever," Cooper says. "I wanted to turn all of that upside down with a modern character--a 21st-century version of Lindbergh."
Like Esther's obsession, the fictional T Cooper's identification with Eminem is more complicated than it seems. He not only channels the rapper onstage, he also "performs Eminem's anger and anxiety and all that stuff in his real life," Cooper points out. It's a covert way of dealing--and not dealing--with his issues.
In creating Slim Lindy, Cooper draws on her own experiences in drag for her Backstreet Boys cover group, the Backdoor Boys. Did she ever perform a drag king routine as Eminem? "No, I never did," she says. "But I have to admit that I find myself unconsciously knowing--and rapping aloud--pretty much all of the lyrics to Eminem's songs. They're running through my head a lot of the time."
COPYRIGHT 2006 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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