The Glass Cage
Description
The second volume of memoir by John Healy, published thirty-seven years after his first: the ‘savage masterpiece’ that was The Grass Arena.
With imaginative prose and startling imagery, Healy presents a life few of us could fathom. Living hand to mouth, he worked in a late-night cafe serving whores, pimps, druggies, window-ledgers, handbag snatchers, narks, and the odd psychopath, but situated at the dim end of the counter at the furthest corner from God’s light on earth, he plotted his escape and wrote The Grass Arena. However, this modern-day masterpiece catapulted him into the world of middle-class literature, a world more treacherous and dangerous than he could ever have imagined. A world where Healy was forced to use tact instead of the brute force he'd previously relied upon.
To become suddenly famous in an unfamiliar world of power and privilege was completely disorienting and The Glass Cage is an unrepentant account of this challenge. A worthy sequel to The Grass Arena, it is John Healy’s crowning achievement.