Books
IN THE SPRING OF 2004, there was only one book being published. At least, that was how it felt to me. The noise around Helen Walsh’s Brass was ambient, inescapable. The author had been breathlessly profiled in a number of broadsheet papers, as part of the carefully co-ordinated PR campaign I’d once assumed to be the due of any debut novelist. Walsh was catnip to journalists, for obvious reasons. She was young and beautiful and clever. She came with an intriguing back story and a suite of provocative opinions. She was an early exemplar of the author-as-brand, a person more interesting than the writing she produced. The book itself occupied a tricky hinterland: insufficiently complex to be classed as literary fiction; too smart to be dismissed as chick lit. But the subject matter was titillating and the paying public bit.
Brass is a bildungsroman with a difference. Its heroine is hooked on cocaine and bought sex.
The plot tracks her progress from putative selfdestruction to something like peace.
It was famous for its verité sex scenes, though it was the unvarnished nature of the main character that really stayed with me. Millie is dreadful. It’s a testament to Walsh’s verve and skill that readers remain with her until the final page. I have read Brass more than once, and I feel something new every time. On my last reading, I kept thinking how it would never be published today.
Poor Millie would be spayed by a sensitivity reader quicker than you can say “problematic”. An ambiguous scene where she sort of assaults an abused girl in a disabled toilet would be struck through with a red pen. Her friendship with Jamie, a man eight years her senior whom she met when she was 13, would be filed under “weird”. Her stated preference for whores who look dirty and drug-addled would be flagged. As would the word whores, for that matter, along with the titular brass. They’d probably be swapped for a more anodyne term, like “sex worker”, and its comforting implication that prostitution is just another job, like waitressing, or delivering post.
In 2004, these were non-issues. I disliked Millie because I’d met her type before. She was a sex traitor who spent all her time sucking up to men, then complained that girls were mean. In the intervening years, Gillian Flynn and the internet furnished me with the language and I can now categorise her in a few short words. She was a Cool Girl, a Pick Me, a Not Like Other Girls Girl. She was labouring under a misapprehension once rife among young women. Namely, that if you acted like one of the boys, they’d be fooled into thinking you were one of the boys, and you’d be spared the routine contempt dished out to ordinary chicks.
In addition to this, she didn’t feel like a proper person. I have yet to meet a real woman who displays the same appetites for anonymous sex and unlubrica
