The Patron Saint of Used Cars and Second Chances

July 6, 2009
Millhone, an NYU professor and columnist for Men's Health
, writes about family crises, stress, anxieties and what he calls “our year from hell” when his son nearly died shortly after birth, his father was diagnosed with cancer, his mother died, his dog bit his oldest son in the face and his marriage was crumbling. Millhone felt he had “a subscription to a tragedy-of-the-month club,” so his solution was to buy a car and travel with his dad. On the road, there are flashbacks to old songs, childhood toys, his marriage and his mother: “Mom had a black belt in backhanded compliments.” As for the trip itself, chapter headings are misleading: the “Vicksburg” visit takes place inside an Applebee's and “Katrinaville” offers only a two-paragraph glimpse of New Orleans from the freeway. Millhone occasionally delivers a funny line amid many strained and strange attempts at humor, such as calling the scattering of his mother's ashes “The Sprinkling.” More often, in a curious contradiction, the tragedy cancels out the comedy, and vice versa, while the road trip reads like a postcard scribble.

May 15, 2009
A simultaneously humorous and poignant memoir from filmmaker and Men's Health columnist Millhone (Screenwriting/New York Univ. Film School).

The author and his wife Rose had had an awful year. His mother died from a heart attack, his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and one of their sons nearly died from birth complications. Then came the sucker punch:"It's after the worst is over that the fun really begins. Post-traumatic stress: the gift that keeps on taking." The lingering emotional fallout severely hurt their marriage, as each retreated into their own dark worlds. Millhone found sanctuary in an"impeccable" 1994 BMW 740i, which he purchased on eBay and had to drive from Texas to his home in New York City. The author asked his father to accompany him, a dicey proposition since growing up with him had been far from easy."My mother couldn't deal with the world, and my father couldn't deal with my mother," he writes,"and so he just went to the office and Mom just went nuts." As the travelers journeyed home, Millhone's memories poured out, each curve in the road eliciting a recollection of another terrible piece that made up the"year from hell." But Millhone is a hopeless romantic, holding on tight to hope and to his love's first flash,"one impossibly hopeful, sun-dappled, forever-now instant of time that we thought would never end."

An impressive display of misery tinged with rueful humor—like Woody Allen wading into Ingmar Bergman.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)