quarta-feira, 4 de abril de 2012

A Novel of Race and Road Rage By LUCINDA ROSENFELD


A Novel of Race and Road Rage

By LUCINDA ROSENFELD

LONG DRIVE HOME
By Will Allison
215 pp. Free Press. $22.


In Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the mistress of a Wall Street bond salesman mows down a black youth in the South Bronx, and he encourages her to keep driving. In Will Allison’s second novel, “Long Drive Home,” another middle-aged money man tries to cover up his role in a racially tinged fatal accident. In Allison’s case, the beleaguered white guy is Glen Bauer, a suburban New Jersey accountant who, offended by the sight of a black teenager in a convertible barreling too fast down his sleepy residential block, swerves briefly into his path to give the kid a scare. Instead, he crashes to his death. What’s more, just as in “Bonfire,” the accident creates a downward spiral in the protagonist’s life that seems to have a momentum of its own.
The similarities end there, however. Wolfe has always painted with the broadest strokes imaginable, his characters functioning primarily as types. Allison occupies the other extreme: all the characters in “Long Drive Home” are essentially blanks, driven to act by the circumstances in which they find themselves. Glen in particular is so far from a type that one has trouble saying anything about the guy other than that he adores his daughter. And yet, what results from Allison’s inquiries into one (Every)man’s guilty conscience is an engrossing little novel with the nagging yet improbable insistence of an anxious dream.
At times, “Long Drive Home” stretches the imagination. I didn’t entirely buy the conceit that a man so protective of his daughter that he becomes her school’s crossing guard would risk her safety by pretending to pull out in front of a maniacally speeding car. (When the accident occurs, the girl, Sara, is in the back seat.) Nor was I convinced by a subplot about Bauer’s increasing obsession with a gun-wielding, macho mechanic with whom he had a verbal run-in minutes before the real nightmare. (The suggestion is that the first instance of road rage leads directly to the second, fatal one.) But Allison’s prose is so clear and matter-of-fact that Glen’s wife’s slow withdrawal from the marriage, following the accident, has an almost Kafkaesque feeling of inevitability about it. What’s more, the crash itself is believable enough that I found myself replaying it over and over again in my head, trying to make sense of who was to blame.
The truth in these things is, of course, hard to pin down. As it’s later revealed, the dead boy has twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood and has been chatting on his cellphone. On the other hand, it’s Glen who cuts the wheel quickly in two directions, trying to rattle the boy and causing him to hit the curb, where he flips. Yet Allison ultimately asks us to sympathize with the road-raging white guy over his reckless black counterpart. To further this goal, the author sprinkles the text with sections of a heartfelt letter that Glen has written for Sara’s future perusal, explaining what really happened and admitting to his place in the action — and it works. The reader hopes that both the boy’s heartbroken mother and the suspicious detective who’s been trailing Glen will drop their cases and move on.
However, this reader at least also came away feeling slightly queasy about commiserating with Glen. Maybe in a future book, Allison will give us the other family’s perspective. It would be an equally complicated and engaging story, if potentially harder to pull off.
Lucinda Rosenfeld’s most recent book is the novel “I’m So Happy for You.” She’s writing a new novel about sisters.

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