Brass [Anglais] [Broché]

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.
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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

This is an extremely gritty version of Sex and the City, in which the sex is always debauched and the city is Liverpool. Nineteen-year-old university student Millie O'Reilley has not taken the news of the impending nuptials of her best mate, 28-year-old Jamie Keeley, very well. Drinking and drugging her way through the evenings, she usually ends up trolling the seedy section of town in search of female prostitutes (the "brass" of the title). Jamie is growing increasingly impatient with and worried by Millie's behavior and is at a loss to explain their relationship to his dim-witted, social-climbing fiancee. What sets this first novel apart within a burgeoning subgenre is Walsh's lyrical prose. Her evocative phrasing both contains and stands in direct contrast to incredibly graphic scenes of depravity, and the result is both disturbing and compelling. Although the rationale finally revealed for Millie's behavior is wholly conventional, nothing else about this novel is ordinary. The depiction of predatory female sexual behavior is, at times, shockingly edgy, and the prose is never less than exquisite. Joanne Wilkinson
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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.