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Summary
Summary
With each new novel, Marcy Dermansky deploys her "brainy, emotionally sophisticated" (New York Times) prose to greater and greater heights, and The Red Car is no exception.
Leah is living in Queens with a possessive husband she doesn't love and a long list of unfulfilled ambitions, when she's jolted from a thick ennui by a call from the past. Her beloved former boss and friend, Judy, has died in a car accident and left Leah her most prized possession and, as it turns out, the instrument of Judy's death: a red sports car.
Judy was the mentor Leah never expected. She encouraged Leah's dreams, analyzed her love life, and eased her into adulthood over long lunches away from the office. Facing the jarring disconnect between the life she expected and the one she is now actually living, Leah takes off for San Francisco to claim Judy's car. In sprawling days defined by sex, sorrow, and unexpected delight, Leah revisits past lives and loves in search of a self she abandoned long ago. Piercing through Leah's surreal haze is the enigmatic voice of Judy, as sharp as ever, providing wry commentary on Leah's every move.
Following her "irresistible" (Time) and "wicked" (Slate) novel Bad Marie, Dermansky evokes yet another edgy, capricious, and beautifully haunting heroine--one whose search for realization is as wonderfully unpredictable and hypnotic as the twists and turns of the Pacific Coast Highway. Tautly wound, transgressive, and mordantly funny, The Red Car is an incisive exploration of one woman's unusual route to self-discovery.
Author Notes
Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Salon, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey with her daughter.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the sleek and polished third novel by the author of Bad Marie, aspiring novelist Leah receives the bequest of the titular vehicle from her former boss Judy, killed when a driver runs a red light. Leah, 33 and unhappily married to the perhaps too-conveniently villainous Hans, whom she married when they were both graduate students and he needed a green card, takes off from Queens for San Francisco to retrieve the car. There follows a series of surreal adventures with old coworkers, a college friend "worth insane amounts of money," a hippie mechanic, and a motel receptionist, as Leah begins to imagine the possibility of a happier future for herself. Dermansky's short, punchy chapters keep the tightly written novel moving smoothly along, and flashbacks to her past add depth without slowing momentum. When fantasy elements-such as the fact that Leah constantly hears the deceased Judy talking to her, as well as the alleged "haunting" of a car that wants its drivers to exceed the speed limit-threaten to steer the novel off course, the author brings it sharply back in line with snappy dialogue and a great ending. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Shocked by the death of her former boss, a young writer leaves her life in New York for a second chance at happiness in San Francisco.When Leah learns that her boss, Judy, died in a fatal traffic accident and left her a red sports car, she decides to travel back to San Francisco to pay her respects. Soon, though, its clear that Leahs trip is about more than saying goodbye to Judy and revisiting her West Coast haunts. Until an argument with her husband, Hans, turned physical, Leah didnt realize how stultifying her marriagewhich provided Hans with a green cardactually was. Why did it feel like my life had stopped once I had gotten married? Leah asks herself, struggling to understand which partnershipsand their domestic trappingsfeel like the right way to live. Now, with Judys voice carefully commenting on her every move from beyond the grave, Leah follows the signs she believes Judy has left for her. We meet a butch lesbian named Lea; former officemates; a Deadhead mechanic; grad school compatriots; a tech billionaire with a major crush; and a beautiful thief waiting to start her life in Big Sur. In vivid, dreamlike prose, Dermansky (Bad Marie, 2010, etc.) shows us how easy it is to feel like a ghost in your own lifeand how difficult it can be to fight your way back to your body. Its no accident that Dermanskys nods to literature and pop culture serve as delightful signposts of surrealismthere are strains of Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami novels, HBOs Six Feet Under and psychedelic drug use. At times its difficult to tell who is haunting whomwhether Judy is haunting Leah or Leah walks like a specter through her past life in order tofinallybuild a future that makes her feel alive. Dermansky delivers a captivating novel about the pursuit of joy that combines dreamlike logic with dark humor, wry observation, and gritty feminism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ardent fans of Dermansky's delectably wicked novel Bad Marie (2010) will pounce on her newest succinct and nervy tale about a young woman of dubious moral standing stumbling through life. An aspiring writer, Leah ends up in San Francisco, reluctantly working in an office where she accepts her coworkers' contempt and is baffled by her kind boss, Judy, who buys a blindingly red sports car that Leah finds sinister. Ten years later, at the start of the twenty-first century, Leah is living in Queens, unhappily married to a writer from Austria, when the red car reenters her life and propels her on a harrowing tour of her past. Dermansky is vigilantly observant, hot-wire funny, and sharply attuned to failures to empathize and the impulse to lie. There is much here that is satisfyingly canny, but Leah can be a drag, and some aspects of her misadventures, while meant to be cuttingly subversive, instead feel forced. Still, Dermansky is a gutsy storyteller, and this is an eerie, psychologically astute tale of a woman mysteriously goaded into changing her life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MISTER MONKEY, by Francine Prose. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) The dreadful revival of a musical based on a children's novel about an orphaned chimp is observed through various points of view in this fresh, Chekhovian novel. FUTURE SEX, by Emily Witt. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A 30-something woman's smart, funny account of her contemporaries' exploration of desire in digital-era San Francisco. KARL MARX: Greatness and Illusion, by Gareth Stedman Jones. (Belknap/Harvard University, $35.) A British historian's gracefully written definitive biography focuses on the man, not the ideology. TRUEVINE. Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) Ariveting account of two albino African-American brothers who were exhibited in a circus. THE RED CAR, by Marcy Dermansky. (Liveright, $24.95.) Surreal encounters and wry observations abound as an aspiring novelist drives cross-country in this tightly written novel. THE LESSER BOHEMIANS, by Eimear McBride. (Hogarth, $26.) McBride brings style and voice to the familiar tale of a girl who leaves a small town for the city and meets a damaged older man. THE MOTH SNOWSTORM: Nature and Joy, by Michael McCarthy. (New York Review, $24.95.) A British environmental journalist's impassioned plea that we celebrate the joy of nature. AMERICAN ULYSSES: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ronald C. White. (Random House, $35.) Grant's virtues shine in White's thorough biography. COLLECTED POEMS, by Marie Ponsot. (Knopf, $35.) This compilation of the work of an underrated poet, now 95, includes new poems as well as old. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.
