Review Detail

On the surface, White Lines is every bit the heir to novels like Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, and it's even set in roughly that era. There's the same pompous sense of style, the flair and snobbery and focus on what people are wearing. Money, drugs and alcohol flow with abundance. Parents flit through only to provide money and housing to their children, too busy with their high society lifestyles to actually parent. Immediate gratification is the main goal of these kids' lives, with questions of the future put off as something to deal with at some later date, as though the problems will melt away.

If what you want from White Lines is a depiction of the seedy club scene of the 1980s, then you will not be disappointed. Cat parties every night, and does a lot of drugs, though primarily cocaine as the title implies. Though she remains somewhat of an innocent in certain areas, she sees a lot and hears about even more. Her job as a promoter brings her into contact with a lot of shady people, most especially the owner of the club where she works, a man in his 40s who obviously has interest in her.

All of that is quite well done and solidly atmospheric, but it's not what sucked me into White Lines. What kept White Lines from feeling tawdry and like a historical fiction version of Gossip Girl was Cat. Obviously, Cat is messed up, raised primarily by her physically abusive mother, who constantly berated and hit her for not being the perfect little daughter. Cat's father ignored the situation, and eventually divorced her mother for a younger, hotter, more exotic woman, setting Cat up in a downtown apartment by herself.

While Cat struggles with a lot of emotional problems as a result of the physical abuse (fear of being touched), mental abuse (self-doubt), and neglect (feelings of being unwanted), she remains surprisingly self-aware. She knows she's doing stupid things and acting out, but doesn't want to stop. Though she suffers from depression and anger, she doesn't whine. Her primary emotion is rage and not self-pity, which is the thing I cannot stand from characters given every opportunity in life who choose to flush their futures down the toilet. Since I appreciated Cat's willingness to take her life at face value, even if she's not handling it well, I really rooted for her to come to some resolution and not to OD before she can grow up and find people who care about her.

What Left Me Wanting More:
The ending, however, came off a bit too rushed. It reads almost like an epilogue, though it's not labeled as such, jumping into the future and detailing what became of everyone in the short term. This skips a lot of details and character growth that would really have added to the emotional impact of the story. The sudden conclusion left me vaguely unsatisfied and unconvinced.

The Final Verdict:
White Lines is a hard-hitting story of the dark, drug-laced 1980s club scene in New York City, and will appeal to readers who enjoy the works of Bret Easton Ellis or have an interest in that era. It's a very dark, upsetting story, but a worthwhile one. I will be curious to see what Banash tackles next.