Miami Purity

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hendricks's debut novel is a noir-ish tale of an aging former stripper whose attempt to go clean leads her into a murderously perverse affair. (June)

Bill Ott

atching the noir novel go mainstream has been a painful experience, like listening to a classic R & B song covered by one of those squeaky clean white-bread groups in the fifties. Noir is no longer a worldview; it isn't even a style, really; it's a pose, an excuse to turn the lights down and smoke cigarettes. Soon, it will probably be a perfume: "Noir, for the femme fatale in you." It's so rare to encounter the real thing these days that when you do, as in Hendricks' sledgehammer of a first novel, the effect is all the more intense: "Hank was drunk and he slugged me--it wasn't the first time--and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it. It was one of those big boom boxes with the cassette player and recorder, but I didn't think it would kill him. That's the first sentence in the story of Sherri Parlay, a topless dancer who tries, in her fashion, to go straight. Like the doomed heroes in a James M. Cain or Jim Thompson novel, though, Sherri isn't going anywhere but down. A job at a dry cleaner called Miami Purity seems safe enough, a symbolic step out of the night life, but the boss lady has a son, a cute son, and before the postman can ring even once, the sexual heat makes the steam rising from the pressing machines seem like an ocean breeze. The most memorable noir heroes, even the most depraved of them, all seek purity; when they don't find it, the killers inside them are unleashed. Hendricks makes unflinching use of the archetypal noir story--flawed character in a flawed world wants more, gets less--but she does it in a voice that's all her own: matter-of-fact yet outrageously funny, grotesque yet discordantly tender. This is no ordinary first novel: when Sherri Parlay enters a room, you pay attention.