Chris Tusa’s Dirty Little Angels , the writer’s first novel, is a gritty, visceral, and sometimes heartbreaking, exploration of the underbelly of New Orleans through the eyes of its sixteen year-old narrator, Hailey Trosclair. This is a book with a seam of hopelessness running through its 147 pages. Whether it’s the broken-down streets and buildings of New Orleans, or the brutal characterization of the inhabitants of the area, there’s a pervading sense of impending disaster in this novel.

Hailey Trosclair is a character of some complication—a willful ingenue intent on using her charms to capture the attention of her best friend Meridian’s boyfriend, Chase. A witness to her brother’s brutal beating of a young boy suspected of being a pedophile; and a visitor of the cancer ward of the local hospital where the husband of her father’s lover, Iris, lies dying of stomach cancer, Hailey circumnavigates a territory of such weight she is destined to sink beneath that world and perish. However, her strength and assiduity carry her through numerous obstacles, and in the end she emerges through such a rite of passage as to leave her stripped of all artifice and naivety. Hailey’s layering is accomplished in such skillful means that it’s hard to believe this is Tusa’s first attempt at the novel form. The author draws the reader into the problematic world of this teenage girl and elicits much sympathy for his floundering heroine.

What impresses about this novel is the rich language Tusa utilizes to describe both character and place. Hailey “dreamed of Mama’s flesh creaking as the doctor unstitched the trapdoor in her stomach. Her insides looked like crushed red velvet, and the baby’s skin was blue as a robin’s egg.” Indeed, Tusa’s most evocative writing is sometimes found in the precise descriptions of the supporting cast of characters like the aptly named preacher, Moses Watkins, who harbors dreams of building a drive-through church in the remnants of an abandoned bank. Tusa’s eye for detail is seen as he describes the bank:

The lobby was empty, except for a few lawn chairs and a stained mattress with rusted springs sticking out the side. The walls were covered with posters, mostly of half-naked girls in string bikinis, rappers with muscles carved into their chests sporting gold chains and fists full of money. Across the room a girl in a pink half-shirt was passed out on the mattress, a half-drunk bottle of Purple Haze in her hand.

The finely wrought descriptions of New Orleans and its post-apocalyptic landscape are wonderfully written and bring the city to life in all its miserable glory. There’s not a misstep in Tusa’s handling of his landscape, and unlike so many recent novels where place and setting are perhaps relegated to the status of Anytown USA, Tusa’s New Orleans is presented as almost another character in and of itself. In fact, Moses Watkins can be read as a trope for New Orleans. He is an enigmatic, larger than life character, who is at times immensely charismatic and at other times a violent and heartless man with destruction in his heart.

The novel’s title is a reference to something Hailey is told in recovery after she swallows a bunch of her mother’s sleeping pills. Chloe says, “I see angels wherever I go,” and calls them dirty because, “They have to eat our souls before we can go to Heaven.” When the angels eat the souls, the dirt “rubs off on their hands and mouths when they eat it.” The title could also come from the complicated range of Hailey’s experiences and behavior. Hailey is the “Dirty little angel” who struggles with the oft-wavering needle of her moral compass as she attempts to understand her place in the world and make sense of those around her.

Dirty Little Angels has been compared to both The Heart is a Inanely Hunter, and The Catcher in the Rye. However, Tusa’s novel explores Hailey’s ruthless pursuit of the self, a journey that neither McCullers nor Salinger fully explores. In Hailey’s ultimate confrontation of Moses, the reader is privy to her complicated salvation. The novel brings both rape and murder to the forefront and in Hailey’s selfless attempt to protect her brother, Cyus, she abandons childhood and enters the world of adulthood with her own crudely realized morality—a code that will hopefully serve to guide her through the dog-eat-dog streets of New Orleans as she seeks her place in the world. » James Claffey, New Delta Review