Snitch Factory: A Novel - Softcover

Plate, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888277025 ISBN 13: 9781888277029

Publisher: Incommunicado Pr, 1997

Synopsis

The media calls it the most unpopular topic in America today: welfare. Every other person in San Francisco is on the dole. Pregnant teenage welfare mothers in orange nylon vests sweep the streets in "workfare" programs. Developmentally disabled couples rob banks. The trickle-down theory has dried up in the city's Mission district. Winos, crack hippies, homeless guys with shopping carts, and refugees from every other city in the nation are now "clients" demanding food stamps at the DSS. Enter Charlene Hassler: social worker. She's become a reluctant middleman in an economic shell game. The clients are going postal - but before they'd turn on themselves, they would bite the hand that refused to feed them.

About this title

Reviews

San Francisco's precarious welfare bureaucracy shudders with random acts of violence and corruption in this poorly realized account of urban decay set in the city's seamy Mission district. Social worker Charlene Hassler has abandoned whatever political ambitions she once held and now concentrates on giving people food stamps and helping them get the most they can from the welfare system. But as if dealing with the hostility of her clients, the rampant crime and violence in the neighborhood and the Byzantine regulations of social-service agencies weren't enough, someone at work is out to get her fired. Plate (One Foot Off the Gutter) fills the novel with evocative details of Mission street life, but elsewhere can't seem to decide whether he wants gritty urban realism or broad satire--Charlene's boss is named Petard, her work rival is named Lavoris. Worse, in Charlene's first-person narration, he substitute's numerous heavy-handed and gratuitous anatomical references--menstrual stains, yeast infections, bra rash, labia rings etc. ("Have you ever been in debt? I hate it worse than getting a Pap smear")--for a subtler evocation of a woman's voice. Ultimately, there is little plot and the supporting characters are ciphers, leaving the reader with a few glimpses of the welfare system and the Mission and some vague social comment buried under a muddle of bad writing.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Incommunicado Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1888277025
• ISBN 13: 9781888277029
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180