The Red Car

August 1, 2016
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.

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, it's clear that Leah's 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 didn't realize how stultifying her marriage--which provided Hans with a green card--actually was. "Why did it feel like my life had stopped once I had gotten married?" Leah asks herself, struggling to understand which partnerships--and their domestic trappings--feel "like the right way to live." Now, with Judy's 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 life--and how difficult it can be to fight your way back to your body. It's no accident that Dermansky's nods to literature and pop culture serve as delightful signposts of surrealism--there are strains of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami novels, HBO's Six Feet Under and psychedelic drug use. At times it's difficult to tell who is haunting whom--whether Judy is haunting Leah or Leah walks like a specter through her past life in order to--finally--build 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(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2016

When Leah Caplan, an aspiring novelist, learns that Judy, her mentor and former boss, has died in an automobile accident, she boards a plane to California to attend the funeral. Upon arrival, Leah discovers that she has inherited her friend's red car--the car in which she died. As she reluctantly takes possession of the vehicle, Leah constantly hears Judy's voice in her head, advising her on to what to do next. The car terrifies her, seeming to have a life of its own, refusing to slow down on highways, and even appearing to repair itself after the accident. When Leah finds her old journal, hidden in the car she begins to reexamine the life she had left behind in California and its meaning to her in the present. VERDICT Dermansky, whose previous novels Twins and Bad Marie focused on young women who make poor choices in the course of maturing, has done it again. Her latest explores the many unwise decisions of her heroine, offering no solutions but encouraging us to hope that things will get better. Readers won't be able to put this one down. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16; an ALA Buzz Book.]--Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2016
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)