Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American house wife can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.
Characters just go off .
It's a beautiful, angry novel about the rot at the heart of the California Dream. And some people get shot. Many mornings spent on the bus to work with this book made my life a lot less painful to bear. While his juvenile books promote anti-authoritarian subtexts, No Blade of Grass has no such agenda. Roger, a government bureaucrat in London, gets wind that martial law is about to be declared and a bombing strike ordered to destroy the major urban centers of England, thus surgically depopulating the country and stretching the meager food supply to feed the survivors.