The driftless zone - Rick Harsch

In this dark and hilarious first novel in Harsch's La Crosse trilogy, Spleen, the hero, falls in love with The Sneering Brunette and is pulled into an intrigue involving a psychotic hit man who eats live pigeons, a snitch named The Fag with no Eyebrows, a reformed snitch named Billy Verite, and two crooked policemen, Stratton and his partner, the black undercover cop in the white city. The plot that unfolds is a dance with the absurd, its wisdom coming from B-movie actors and philosophical taxi drivers which flirts with the anti-romance of Algren and Bukowski.