What do Truman Capote and Michael Jackson have in common? They're "White Girls," according to Hilton Als, the New Yorker writer whose incendiary new book - his first major work since "The Women" in 1996 - brings up race and gender identity in modern America while blurring the lines between memoir, cultural critique and fiction. "It's a pejorative term, similar to the use of "black girl" to describe a model of color in the fashion world," Als says. "The white girls in this book are marginalized by the status quo because of their race and gender," or because they are trying to "pass" as a member of the world responsible for their disenfranchisement. Here, passages excerpted from "White Girls" (out Nov. 12 from McSweeney's; $24), which Als describes as a kind of "philosophical whodunit." "EMINEM's canon has been defined by its fury; the rapper, according to Als, is described by many critics as "a lower-class id" with a "bitter, white-trash tongue." Raised poor by a single mom, he'd been "feminized by the tyranny of poverty and Daddy need," Als writes. Just like Mommy. Staking no claim to the relative privilege granted to white children growing up in Detroit in the 1980s, he felt "about as welcome in the world as any black man. And rap's dissonant sound was the soundtrack to all that. MICHAEL JACKSON was, Als argues, "most like himself when he was someone other than himself." He " "dated" a number of white starlets" - Tatum O'Neal, Brooke Shields - but after being photographed together "two or three times, they were never seen with him again," the implication being that these were sham relationships. Among segments of New York's black gay community, Jackson had been referred to as "she" or a "white woman," before he eventually endured various procedures to lighten his skin and redden his lips - "a mask that distanced him from blackness just as his sexuality distanced him from blacks." RICHARD PRYOR is perhaps best known for his comedic timing, but Als paints the portrait of a self-loathing stand-up with a history of abuse (both as the victim and the perpetrator). His ex-wife, Jennifer Lee, tells Als, " "One of the ways Richard became popular was through women falling in love with him - they saw themselves in him, in his not fitting in, the solitude of it all, and his willingness to be vulnerable as women are." "