Real Mccoy A Novel [Hardcover]

Deadpan comic and grandly imaginative, The Real McCoy, Darin Strauss's recounting of the life of a legendary grifter, is a sparkling, memorable novel. Strauss (author of the highly acclaimed Chang and Eng) tells the story of Virgil Selby, or "Kid" McCoy, turn-of-the-century flimflammer, welterweight champion, and the speculative origin of the famous titular catch phrase. After witnessing the death of a small-time boxer named McCoy, young Selby adopts his name and reputation and leaves his Indiana home to achieve renown. Taking up residence in Louisville, McCoy befriends brilliant Chinese con man Jonnie Gold, who teaches McCoy the twist fist fighting style and the art of the flimflam. The naive and monomaniacal McCoy soon departs for New York City, where he uses his newfound trickery to conquer the boxing world, marry a Broadway starlet, and become a minor celebrity and the origin of a national phenomenon. However, McCoy's perpetual mythmaking catches up with him, revealing the cost of his attempts to turn a life of fiction into immortality.

Strauss has created a resounding personal narrative and cultural allegory with The Real McCoy. The hopeful, starstruck McCoy embodies the obsessive American tendency toward self-improvement and reinvention, and demonstrates the consequences of these ideals. Like its hero's successful though obvious scams, The Real McCoy is wonderfully entertaining fiction that reveals no small amount of truth. --Ross Doll

Strauss follows a brilliant debut novel (Chang and Eng) with more fictive doctoring of history in this daring, unique reenactment of the life of reed-thin, bone-weary Virgil Selby, who came to be known as Kid McCoy: a talented turn-of-the-century boxer, professional flimflammer and bigamist. The book opens with a bogus charity benefit exhibition boxing match on the first night of the new millennium (1900) as Kid McCoy fights and defeats welterweight champ Tommy Ryan, garnering the crown for himself. The narrative backtracks several years as McCoy, a young runaway still developing his boxing form, meets Johnnie Gold, a philosophical Chinese grifter who initiates McCoy into a life of swindling and deceit, peddling snake oil remedies and betting on fixed horse races. Lonely at times, McCoy settles on a timid department store clerk, and though he's not in love, he marries her, if only to test his new powers of flimflam. When he moves to Manhattan, vaudeville actress Susan Fields catches his eye and they quickly marry, just in time for a spectacular rematch with Tommy Ryanwhich is set up for McCoy to win but backfires, sending McCoy into a depression compounded by an unexpected visit from his father. Several championship fights, another marriage and a cinematic jewel heist later, McCoy emerges as the defeated narrator of his own madcap tale. Apart from the book's awkwardly shifting time line (a device that too often steals McCoy's thunder), this book is well written, comprehensively researched, and stylish, sure to score at the cash register. The big question on fans' lips: Whom will Strauss consecrate next?
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Set in brawling turn-of-the-century New York, Strauss's second novel (after Chang and Eng) is loosely based on the life of boxer Norman "Kid McCoy" Selby, whose nom de guerre is one of the possible sources of the title's catch phrase. The product of an unhappy Indiana childhood, Selby (called Virgil Selby here) takes the name of a fighter he has let die following a match. After some lessons in swindling from a Chinese flimflam artist named Johnny Gold, the self-created McCoy moves to New York, soon winning the welterweight title by virtue of a scam. The title brings him fame and the love of his life, stage actress Susan Fields, and, in an ironic twist central to the novel, turns him into that great emblem of authenticity, "the real McCoy." Fascinating in its exploration of the multiple facets of Selby's personality, this is a powerful and heartbreakingly American tale of identity and loss, marred only by Strauss's somewhat didactic use of his protagonist as a symbol of societal change. Recommended for all public libraries. Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Like his acclaimed first novel, Chang and Eng (2000), Strauss takes a curious historical footnote and carves from it a sprawling, quirky, and delightful story. It's the end of the nineteenth century, and Kid McCoy--a small-time boxer long past his prime--comes to young Virgil Selby's town. McCoy is beaten so badly that he dies. Virgil drags the dying man to the forest, learns the location of Kid McCoy's next fight, and then--poof--becomes Kid McCoy. Kid, nee Virgil, ends up in a Chinese railroad worker community, where he meets Johnny Gold, a first-rate flimflam man with a habit of not finishing his . . . McCoy and Gold team up, and eventually McCoy cons his way to a world boxing title, becoming the toast of New York society and the proverbial real McCoy. There is, of course, nothing real about McCoy, and the continuing intrusion of his old identity wrecks each of his many marriages to the lovely but fickle Susan. Sprinkled with the phraseology and energy of turn-of-the-century America, this is the story of a real American dream, one where big plans and a laid-back conscience lead to linguistic immortality, if not happiness. John Green
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Highly imaginative -- Vanity Fair, June 2002

Strauss remains one of the most interesting and promising of younger American novelists. -- Kirkus Reviews

The New York Times Book Review called Chang and Eng, Darin Strauss's extraordinary debut novel, "a spirited story of heroic longing." Joyce Carol Oates called it "a remarkable first novel...one of the most riskily imagined and successfully realized novels I've read in years." Now this uncommonly gifted storyteller brings us another strikingly original novel.

Are you the Real McCoy?

Loosely based on the real life of a turn-of-the-century icon and charlatan, The Real McCoy introduces a character like no other in recent contemporary fiction. "Kid" McCoy was a man of many talents and faces: championship boxer, jewel thief, scam artist, and grifter extraordinaire. Unfolding against the tumultuous backdrop of history, his story becomes a fascinating mirror of the times as he moves from city to city in pursuit of the next con, always living life as he becomes a legend and a symbol of all that's true in America. An audacious and unforgettable novel about identity, illusion, and the search for love, The Real McCoy is bound to become another literary sensation.

Darin Strauss is the author of Chang and Eng. He teaches at New York University.