General Information
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 Title:                  A Diet Of Treacle
 Author:                 Lawrence Block
 Copyright:              2008
 Audiobook Copyright:    2008
 Genre:                  audiobook

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 Total Duration:         4:29:45
 Total MP3 Size:         123.51
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 Ripped By:              Me
 Ripped With:            Cooledit
 Encoded At:             CBR 64 kbit/s 22050 Hz Joint Stereo
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Book Description
================
With Hard Case Crime’s release of Lawrence Block’s Lucky at Cards last year, 
it permitted Block to obey the biblical directive not to hide one’s 
talents under a bushel. Lucky was originally published under the pen name of 
Sheldon Lord, and we first learn that Block wrote it only with its 
publication by Hard Case Crime.  With Hard Case Crime’s 2008 release of 
Block’s A Diet of Treacle, originally published as Pads are for Passion 
(A Diet of Treacle was Block’s original title, but his publisher rejected 
it as “too artsy”) in 1961 also under the Sheldon Lord by-line, 
Block takes a further step on the straight and narrow.  And with the planned 
Hard Case Crime publication of another pseudonymous work of Block’s in 
January 2009, entitled Killing Castro this time around, Block continues to 
reveal some the of "hidden" early works.  (Block is said to have written 
numerous erotic books early in his career under pen names that he will 
never own up to due to those books’ decidedly inferior quality.)

The setting for Diet is Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of 
New York City during the late 50’s and early 60’s.  There are three 
principal characters and they have varying degrees of affiliation 
with the so-called beats, many of whom migrated to, congregated at or 
settled in the Village or the neighboring Lower East Side and were adherents 
of sorts of the Beat Writers, like “Saint” Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and 
William Boroughs, and consisted of those who to certain degrees had dropped 
out of the straight or square life and were the precursors to the drug culture 
that arose during the 1960’s, which would eventually establish in-roads into 
all segments  of U.S. society.

The principal characters in Diet include Shank, aka Leon Marston, a 
20-year-old high school dropout, who is also a military service reject, 
based on a psychological assessment of his being a psychopath.  
His acquired name is on account of the knife he carried at all times.  
He is incapable and uninterested in holding down a steady job and makes 
ends meet by peddling pot.   In Shank’s way of thinking, there are two 
kinds of people, squares whom he wanted no part of and hipsters with whom 
he fully related.

Then, there is Joe Milani, seven years Shank’s senior.  Joe is into the 
hip culture, especially insofar as it excused him from working and permitted 
him to get high and engage in free love.  However, Joe is nevertheless 
conflicted and debates with himself about whether he is the way he is because 
he is a screw-up or because the world is messed up.  For the time being, 
the latter view influences his actions and Joe essentially does nothing and 
lives off roommate Shank’s drug dealing earnings, which Shank is only too 
happy to do for a fellow misfit and dropout.

Finally, enter Anita Carbone, an attractive college student who makes periodic 
visits to the Village to check out that scene.  Joe picks her up, and she 
eventually asks to move in with him.  She is confused about herself and is 
bored with the direction her life is destined to go if she stays on the square 
track it’s on.  As it is, she would marry her engineer boyfriend and end up in 
a split-level house in suburbia with “2-point-3” kids and all the appointed 
accessories of middle class life.  She wants more and thinks Joe’s way of life 
is the path out of deadly boredom.  It takes some doing for her to adjust to 
the life of drugs and uninhibited sex and not doing much else.  There is an 
immediate mutual dislike between Anita and Shank, and soon after she moves in 
with Shank and Joe, Anita insists that she and Joe get their own place, which 
insistence takes on some urgency on her part after Shank rapes her and swears 
her to secrecy with his knife.


Such a move requires income, which in turn means that she and/or Joe had to get a job.  
Fortuitously or not, when Shank’s pot supplier is put out of commission by 
incarceration, a new supplier introduces Shank to the more lucrative field of 
heroin sales.  In addition to the greater profit margins, the new supplier also 
touts how Shank’s new client base of addicted junkies would be less likely to 
rat him out to the cops for fear of being cut off by other dealers for such disloyalty.  
So, when Joe tells Shank that he needs to find work for the new apartment, 
Shank is in a position to offer Joe a job assisting for him with his booming business.  
Joe gratefully accepts; he concedes that he’d never be able to go (and stick with) 
the 9-to-5 route.

Shank’s new dealer forgot to mention that the police are also more vigilant in 
pursuing heroin dealers, and when a narc corners Shank, something terrible 
happens (the book’s cover art depicts the scene), and Shank, Joe and Anita 
are forced to skip town immediately and flee from the law. 

Tension about this turn of events and conflicts arising out the relative 
degree of culpability among them and due to Shank's resorting to violent 
crimes to raise money to fund their flight (which landed them in Chicago, 
after stops in Buffalo and Cleveland), compound their predicament and put 
them on a collision course that comes to a head at the end of the story.

In addition to Diet’s significance as being one of Block's first published works, 
it is also significant as being a period piece about the "beat generation" of 
the late 50's/early 60's, written contemporaneously with that period.  Block 
makes a pointed critique of this emerging segment of society, small as it was, 
though it would nevertheless influence future generations.  Block summarizes 
his feeling about this phenomenon through the following thoughts he put into 
Anita’s mind:
“In rejecting the values of a society they couldn’t cope with, they had made 
the drastic mistake of setting up their own society—every bit as illogical 
as the one they had rebelled against.  And they had bowed to their own 
society’s false values while they had rejected a little too vehemently the 
false values of the repudiated society.”

Diet is a truly fine piece of writing by the early Block, a precursor to 
the prodigious, masterful work to follow. By the way, “treacle” is an 
extremely sugary syrup.  The foreword of the book contains an excerpt from 
Alice in Wonderland  about persons who lived on treacle and who got very 
sick because of it. Treacle apparently symbolizes drugs and other excesses 
of the beat generation.