The Company Car

April 18, 2005
Two generations of the Czabeks—Wally, Susan and their seven kids—make for a nuanced study of the American family and the mysteries of marriage in this dense, heartfelt saga. With Wally and Susan's son Emil narrating, Hribal (The Clouds of Memphis
) takes readers on a 50-year quest for the American dream, from a goofy televised postwar marriage ceremony through the Czabeks' flight in the 1960s from suburban Chicago to a 99-acre Wisconsin farm ("We had gone bucolic by the time the decade really exploded") to a 50th-anniversary gathering that serves as a crucible for decades of accumulated family conflict. The Czabeks persevere through one misadventure after another; Wally pursues get-rich-quick schemes and drowns his demons in drink while each family member seeks his or her own private ways to cope with life's contradictions. Hribal chronicles the lives of this sprawling, chaotic cast of characters with a level of minutiae that tends to lessen the narrative's sense of urgency, but he courageously doesn't stint in his efforts to answer the big questions he poses, even though we may have guessed some of the answers ourselves. Agent, Nat Sobel
.

January 1, 2005
Even as he celebrates his parents' 50th anniversary, Emil wonders how long they'll survive on their own-and how he'll survive when his marriage ends.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2005
Having loaded up the wife and kids in the minivan to travel from Milwaukee to the family farm, where his siblings are gathering to celebrate their parents' fiftieth anniversary, Emil Czabeck embarks on a trip down a memory lane that is full of emotional potholes. Yet for the reader of Hribal's raucous revisiting of family life in the last half of the last century, it is a trip that is as exhilarating as a ride on the most convoluted roller coaster. Wally and Susan Czabeck got married in the rose-colored glow of post-World War II America and began raising their family of seven kids in the burgeoning Chicago suburbs, only to realize that life at the end of the trolley line wasn't as idyllic as advertised. A pie-eyed dreamer, Wally decamps even further afield, dragging the family to a rundown farm in rural Wisconsin, where he discovers there are dangers lurking in nature that this city boy never knew existed. Vividly atmospheric, irresistibly winsome, Hribal's loving paean to the American dream is as comforting and familiar as the classic fifties-era sitcoms it richly evokes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)