A DIET OF TREACLE - LAWRENCE BLOCK
More pulp fiction, this time from 1961 and involving 'sex, drugs, and murder in the land of the lotus eaters', as it says in the blurb on the back cover. What this means is that it's set in Greenwich Village when that particular area of New York was being newly populated by Beatniks and stoners who, of course, over the coming years would evolve into hippies. Written by Lawrence Block, A Diet Of Treacle takes its name from a line in Alice In Wonderland where the dormouse is telling Alice about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well.
'What did they live on?' asks Alice. 'They lived on treacle,' the dormouse replies. 'They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice remarks 'They'd have been ill'. 'So they were,' the dormouse says. 'Very ill'.
A Diet Of Treacle is a sort of morality tale, but also by accident rather than design it's very much an Existentialist novel from almost the same school as works by Camus and Sartre. That's not to say it's in any way philosophical but there are passages that are clearly echoes of Camus' The Outsider and Sartre's general brooding in any of his Roads to Freedom trilogy.
A college girl from Uptown New York visits Greenwich Village because she's bored with the life on offer to her and feels there must be something else, something more. She finds it in the form of Joe, ex-Korean War veteran who after two years of dodging bullets in Korea has returned home and after a short spell at New York University has dropped out and is now part and fixture of 'the scene' in the Village.
In reality this means hanging out at down-at-heel cafes, living in a rented hell-hole of a single room with his soon to be heroin dealing friend, and contemplating being, nothingness and what Joe refers to as 'immobility'. The girl moves in with Joe and his friend forming a sort of anti-Jules et Jim menage a trois, whereupon she's one day raped by Joe's roommate before him killing a police officer forcing all three to go on the run.
For a pulp fiction novel such as this, the allusions to Existential thought are quite surprising although the morality it espouses not so, in fact it's a little disappointing. The treacle the title of the book refers to can be interpreted as either the Beatnik lifestyle it describes as in the mythological lotus eaters' preoccupations, or more specifically - drugs.
The first time the girl tries marijuana, for example, is at a house party where she becomes so stoned that she takes off all her clothes and has sex with Joe in the middle of the floor, watched by all the other party-goers. As you do whenever you first smoke weed.
Smoking marijuana also leads on to taking heroin, which then leads to murder and prostitution, apparently. All good, American 1950s moral majority type-stuff and conservative to the hilt. But apart from this, so long as you can keep the morality from eclipsing everything else, A Diet Of Treacle is a decent enough book and is worth anyone's few cents at the dime store.
John Serpico
