SOURCE: “Ghosts in the Machine,” in London Review of Books, February 5, 1987, pp. 12-13.

In the following review, Dibdin discusses Janowitz's thematic concerns in the novel Slaves of New York.

How do you like to be approached by a strange work of fiction? Do you prefer a hearty handshake (‘Call me Ishmael’), a more discursive line (‘All happy families are alike’), or a low-key manner (‘For a long time I used to go to bed early’)? What about this, for example?

After I became a prostitute, I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size. Some large, others quite shrivelled and pendulous of testicle. Some blue-veined and reeking of Stilton, some miserly.

The narrator is a Jewish princess who took up her trade ‘when my job as script girl for a German-produced movie to be filmed in Venezuela fell through’; her pimp, Bob, had been a...