Bellocq's Women

In 1912 in Storyville the notorious red-light district of New Orleans a photographer named E. J. Bellocq took a series of photographs of the women who worked in the brothels. Rediscovered in the 1950s Bellocq's photographs have become famous but the man himself remains a mystery.In Bellocq's Women Peter Everett performs as remarkable a feat of fictional reconstruction as he did in Matisse's War and The Voyages of Alfred Wallis. All we have of Bellocq are his photographs and a few fragmentary memories; in this extraordinary novel Everett not only brings the photographer to life - and with him his strange tortured relationship with his mother and two young girls one his landlady's daughter the other a child whore - but also his world - the opium dens and bar rooms of New Orleans and the whore houses with their surreal combination of violence and homeliness.