Description:
If you like brainy dames, feuding hoods, and sharp-tongued hacks all heading for the heist to end all heists against a noir-as-night backdrop in 1950s Chicago, then The House of Whacks is for you. Young British writer Matthew Branton can do graceful epic prose; he just chooses not to. He spreads out his talent for convincing, meaty motivations among smart-girl Susan who's an S&M model in the eponymous House; Ben, her ticket to mollhood; Misty, a tough cookie who's dying of cancer and closing up her pulp-fiction outfit; and Lucky, a screenwriter playing soldier for "field detail" in Korea. But the biggest character is America itself--its slang, pop culture, and the casualties of its dream machine. It is also about writers, those squeezed out by McCarthy or sexism and now by TV, which is forcing career rethinks as fast as IT has done in the '90s. Each character fears becoming part of "America's real invention--a mass of undignified poor, who're never going to learn to tolerate anyone because they despise themselves." Although Branton uses the story-within-a-story device once too often, and his pace is a little jerky, he injects his gritty, idiomatic prose with fresh, perky humor. His climax, too, pops full of surprises. --Cherry Smyth, Amazon.co.uk
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