Brass [Paperback]

Helen Walsh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2004

Not since Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting has an ambitious first novel created such a stir among readers of important new voices in fiction. Since its release in the United Kingdom, Brass has sent shock waves through literary circles for its raw, unrelenting, poetic, and utterly compelling portrait of Millie, a promising college kid drifting into a deceptively inviting world of street culture, drug-induced adorations, and sexual hedonism.
Helen Walsh, at the age of twenty-seven, has produced a staggeringly alive debut novel that portrays a generation of youth—those coming of age in the '80s and '90s—through the prism of Millie. Millie and her best friend, Jamie, have been through it all together. However, as Millie is lured away from what was a promising academic career toward a life of numbing drugs and increasingly deviant sexual encounters, Jamie is finally settling down with his girlfriend. Millie feels betrayed by one of the few authentic and nurturing relationships in her life, just as she discovers her own limitations and the more penetrating complexities of a family she thought she knew.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Along with recent noteworthy debuts from Bella Bathurst (Special) and Jardine Libaire (Here Kitty Kitty), this novel is part of an emerging subgenre that might be called chick-lit noir. Its antiheroines are motivated—if you can call it that—by a creeping anomie and low-grade nihilism. If these girls have any ambitions at all, they are emotional abnegation, deranged sexual pleasures and/or chemical obliteration. Walsh's 19-year-old Millie could be the poster child for the subgenre as she bombs around her native Liverpool, lusting after barely adolescent girls and packing her head with booze and blow. Precocious, petulant, middle-class Millie has been "thick as thieves" with a posse of thuggish working-class guys since she was barely a teenager. But her best friend Jamie's increasing commitment to his fiancée has created a "big dilating chasm" between them and has exacerbated Millie's tendency toward self-destructive behavior. Haunted by her perceived loss of Jamie and the painful memory of her estranged mother, "the savage and gradual build-up of [years of] filth and deceit" finally catches up with her and sends her spiraling into depravity. Millie's caustic commentary on the electro-charged sexual and intellectual power of postadolescent women heralds the arrival of a promising new voice from the darker fringes of antigirlhood.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This début novel reaches out to its target audience quickly. Millie, a student in Liverpool and one of two first-person narrators, introduces herself by having sex in a graveyard with a female prostitute, snorting cocaine ("beak"), and rhapsodizing about the sky. Her co-narrator, Jamie, speaks in opaque Liverpool slang (in a musical substitution, "lad" becomes "la") and tries to keep up with his friend's string of self-debasing escapades. Millie's journey is a classic bildungsroman, a reckoning of her parents' sudden separation and a thoughtful, if expensive, interrogation of sex and friendship. All this might amount to no more than a voguish blend of Irvine Welsh and Michel Houellebecq, but Walsh's prose is rhythmic and carefully judged, and her descriptions are convincingly tactile. Every time an uncomfortable situation occurs, she holds steady and makes each miserable moment sink in.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S. (October 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841954845
• ISBN-13: 978-1841954844
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,152,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perverse, Raw and Entertaining, February 2, 2005

By 

Chris S. Jackson "the future ain't what it us... (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brass (Paperback)

Having received this book for Christmas, I was immediately intrigued by the back cover description and I read this book voraciously until I was finished. It is a brilliant effort by Walsh, full of interesting dialogue, English slang and perverse sexual descriptions. Being American I wasn't used to all of the working class slang but it can be deciphered on context and it is written phonetically. It's like Trainspotting in its raw and visceral feel. Thoroughly entertaining and a little autobiographical I can assume by the acknowledgements. It is totally a guilty pleasure with some of Milli's explicit dialogue and perverse desires. This is not for the prudish at heart. Recommended for all of the sexually and chemically adventurous... Looking forward to Walsh's next effort!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing, graphic, and sexually depraved, August 25, 2006

By 

Guillermo Amaro "& Ninoska Titinger" (Lima, PERU) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brass (Paperback)

This is a striking book; it's very disturbing, erotic, depraved, and dark.
Millie's story is startling, sexually depraved, frenetic, and self destructive. Once her mother leaves her father and her to fend for themselves, it all changes dramatically for her. She shuts down and lives in her thoughts, hating everything and everyone. She loses herself and runs away from reality every chance she gets and she cannot stop herself, she just cannot stop.
She learns that she is gay when she finds a pornographic magazine on her best buddy's room, she checks the pictures of a couple of women together and it changes everything for her forever.
She needs depravity to get turned on and she looks for filthy corners and hookers, she looks for women perched on window sills doing nothing, just waiting for the men that are used to paying for sex; they are waiting to sell their bodies and their souls, and Millie loves it, she loves the depravity of it all and craves for it as much as she craves for cocaine, ecstasy and the love of Jamie, her best buddy.
This is a story of a girl who grows up too fast once her mother is gone and who has no limits set to her, she can do as she pleases, she can stay the night wherever she wants and she is throwing away her chance at a career. She is blowing everything away.
Raw, a story of queer predilections, bad choices, and the descent into a life of hedonism, loneliness, and dark days with darker nights; I can only recommend it to those who like ruthless books, crude awakenings and profound stories, there is nothing shallow or superficial about this book and I liked it for that, it's real, unpleasant, and unashamed.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A real downer, April 30, 2005

By 

Cherry Stone "Cherry" (Baltimore, MD, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brass (Paperback)

When I started to read this it had a certain optimism. The heroine, nineteen year old Millie, who is from a well educated millieu, is at university but doesn't care much for her studies. Her reaction to the splitting up of her parents has obviously tipped her into chaos and she reacts to this by befriending a gang of working class Liverpudlean lads and their families. She seeks a warmth that is lacking in her own family. And so far, this is commendable, but unfortunately this does not solve any of her problems. Apart from a pretty serious coke and E habit she indulges in what can only be described as seriously deranged sexual practices and is constantly compelled to sleep with prostitutes and on one occasion to stay at a prostitute's house in order to insert bottles into various orifices.

After a while of such hard core events you'd think the reader would become numb, but no. I felt more and more sick, and this is certainly credit to the author, but I just felt so sorry for Millie, I really did, and I just felt there wasn't much hope for her. Let me say, Walsh is a brilliant writer, her descriptions are so real they make you totally get under Millie's skin, but by the same token, the hyper-reality of her style swiftly made me nauseous. This is like A Clockwork Orange but far more real and while I have the feeling it will become some kind of literary classic, I'm afraid that all in all it was too rich for my stomach.