Springsteen describes the car as a way out of the rust belt, but often with frustrating results, and he touches on an encounter with a state trooper. Mukerjee shows how car types and even an Amish buggy reflect their originating cultures, and he depicts a refugee from Afghanistan taking advantage of the international airline system. Hogan tells of a woman who settles after taking the wrong turn on a freeway, and then describes a beaded railroad engineer's hat as a symbol of Native American interaction with the technological culture, a motif also reflected by Glancy where the car provides metaphors for changes among the Cherokee. Tillman describes difficulties in coordinating schedules among modes of transportation in Europe and North Africa. Butler imagines a future California where old and rehabilitated cars are used by bandits yet still give some promise of escape. Marshall uses the luxury cruise ship both to represent a social microcosm and, with other boats, to explore African-Americans' Caribbean roots.
Auto accidents, their causes and their consequences, are the main topic in Wolfe's novel; he also explores the complex social roles of the New York subway, limousines and busses. On a smaller scale, Brown describes a dog killed by a car and its young owner's revenge which leads to a fatal crash. Mooney includes the thrill and danger of high speed driving, along with insights into the world of people who have an employees' airline pass. DiLillo sets his tale at a midwestern college where station wagons are used for dropping students off for the year, and where automobile crashes are the subject of an academic course. Vonnegut's novel of a New York college explores peoples' concern about the relative prestige of car makes and models; the scholarly subjects include the history of the Conestoga wagon and the Erie canal. Mason juxtaposes the backdrop of running ordinary errands with children's coming on planes to visit their ailing mother. An ordinary plane flight begins Clark's mystery story, while a car key is the crucial clue; Cooper sets a mystery in Oklahoma, specifically Highway 5, and car models, years, and colors give both leads and false clues throughout. Dorris and Erdrich set the ordinary use of cars in New Hampshire, with details like the inconvenience of the seatbelt for a late-pregnancy woman, against the place of cars on a Caribbean island which has become the recycling place for worn out American clunkers where some of the old enthusiasm about cars as reflections of their drivers is revived.
Author: Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)
Title: Various songs
Date: 1975-1987
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary
Up until his most recent work, the car/road metaphor has played a central role in Springsteen's lyrics, such a pervasive role that any discussion of the place of cars in his music must, in this context, be very selective. We want to look at five of his songs, all from different albums, which reveal how the car - what it can provide, what it means - has changed over the twenty-year course of Springsteen's songwriting career. The five songs are "Thunder Road," from Born to Run (1975), "Racing in the Street," from Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), "State Trooper," from Nebraska (1982), "Cautious Man," from Tunnel of Love (1987), and "Seeds," from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live/1975-85 (1986).
The narrator of "Thunder Road" is a young man trying to convince a young girl named Mary, to get in his car and ride off with him to "case the promised land," telling her "these two lanes will take us anywhere." At the same time, he makes it clear that he's no savior: "Well now I'm no hero / That's understood / All the redemption I can offer girl / Is beneath this dirty hood." However, that car, and the road it will take them to, is enough; getting out can save them. But the narrator can't do it alone - Mary, her companionship, is crucial to the journey, as those before him have discovered: "There were ghosts in the eyes / Of all the boys you sent away / They haunt this dusty beach road / In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets." The narrator concludes, "… so Mary climb in / It's a town full of losers / And I'm pulling out of here to win." In this early song Springsteen is clearly tapping into the American myth of the road as a way out of the rust belt, the way to a more prosperous and fulfilling life.
But after Born to Run it's hard to find such optimism in the songs. "Racing in the Street" is a song narrated by a man who rides from "town to town" in his '69 Chevy, with his partner, Sonny, and races for money. But rather than celebratory, the song is mostly a somber one. They've been racing for years, and seemingly "getting" nowhere; his girlfriend "cries herself to sleep at night," and "all her pretty dreams are torn / She stares off alone into the night / With the eyes of one who hates just for being born." But the narrator is still hopeful, despite their struggles: "Tonight my baby and me, we're going to drive to the sea / And wash these sins off our hands." Though the promise of the road is unraveling in this song, the narrator suggests there is still some modicum of self-respect to be gained on the road: "Some guys just give up living / And start dyin' little by little, piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up / And go racing in the street."
If the man and woman in "Racing in the Streets" are possibly an older and somewhat disillusioned version of the male narrator and Mary in "Thunder Road," then the driver in "State Trooper" could be seen as the next step in the downward spiral that the road finally hasn't been able to remedy. In this short, tense song, the narrator is driving around alone, late at night, on the edge, ready to explode. "Mister state trooper," he warns, "please don't stop me / Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife …" The driver has no "license, registration," he's on the margins of society, with no place to go, no place to drive. The song concludes "Hey somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi ho silver o, deliver me from nowhere." In this song, the road has become a place of isolation and loneliness, in strong contrast to the place of hope and potential that "Thunder Road" depicts.
There are very few road songs in Springsteen's most recent work, an absence which reveals how the metaphor had become a dead end in his songwriting. "Cautious Man" makes explicit his distrust of the road as a solution to people's problems. In the first line we learn that "Bill Horton was a cautious man of the road," that he carefully keeps himself apart and protected. But Bill falls in love and marries "a young girl," lets "his cautiousness slip away." One night, after a terrible dream about losing his wife, Bill gets out of bed: "He got dressed in the moonlight and down to the highway he strode / When he got there he didn't find nothing but road." Finally, the road has nothing to offer, only escapism; Bill returns to his bed, ready to stay with his wife, ready to take that chance. In Springsteen's recent work, the adult thing to do is not get in your car and drive away, but to face up to your problems and to your self, and to work on strengthening and preserving connections to the important people in your life.
"Seeds" doesn't fit neatly into the evolution we've outlined, but it does connect Springsteen's work to that of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck (two important influences). The song is narrated by a man who has left the industrial midwest and, with his "wife and kids," driven down to Texas in search of work. But like the Joads, this family finds no work, and though their situation soon becomes desperate, they get little sympathy from the locals: "Parked in the lumberyard freezin' our asses off / My kids in the backseat got a graveyard cough / Well I'm sleepin' up front with my wife / Billy club tappin' on the windshield in the middle of the night / Says 'Move along man move along.'" Cars also mark class differences in the song, distinguish between those who have too much and those who have too little: "Well big limousine long shiny and black / You don't look ahead you don't look back / How many times can you get up after you've been hit? / Well I swear if I could spare the spit / I'd lay one on your shiny chrome / And send you on your way back home." At the end of the song the narrator, though he headed for Texas believing in the promise of the road, just as the Joads headed for California, warns that it's an empty promise: "So if you're going to leave your town where the north wind blow / To go on down where that sweet soda river flow / Well you better think twice on it Jack / You're better off buyin' a shotgun dead off the rack / You ain't gonna find nothin' down here friend / Except seeds blowin' up the highway in the south wind / Movin' on movin' on it's gone gone it's all gone." Like the Joads these people have no choice but to keep moving on, but they have less hope than Ma Joad, convinced that "it's gone gone all gone." A bleak song, "Seeds" is also sung with a lot of anger, anger that the promise of the road, which is largely synonymous with the promise of America, has proved hollow, has betrayed those who believed.
Edition used: Columbia Records.
Author: Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940)
Title: "Orbiting" In The Middleman and Other Stories
Date: 1988
Systems: Buggy, car, airplane
Context: 1980s, Manhattan
This story uses Thanksgiving dinner to stage Manhattan's clash of religious, ethnic, and immigrant cultures. Mukherjee critiques a brand-name cosmopolitanism or worldliness that is ignorant of international issues. Thus the Volvo and Ingmar Bergman become examples of "Swedish engineering" for one character. Meanwhile Brent, who met his wife on a cruise ship, owns a BMW he bought "on the gray market and saved a bundle ... then spent $300 to put in a horn that beeps a Sousa march" (King Cotton). Ironically, Brent's dad is an Amish farmer in Iowa who has "never taken their buggy out of the county."
Cars and cruises display the consumer savvy and prestige of these relatives and in-laws of Italian and Amish descent. However, the pleasure of this American dream fulfilled is offset (rather melodramatically) by the presence of Roashan, the Afghani refugee. Ro, a political prisoner and torture victim, manipulates global transport for different ends. He tells a disbelieving crowd of his escape from Afghanistan via bribes and a forged visa; he concludes saying he spent six days "orbiting" international airports - "the main trick is to have a valid ticket, that way the airline has to carry you, even if the country won't take you in."
Edition used: New York: Fawcett, 1988.
Author: Linda Hogan (b. 1947)
Title: "Making Do"
Date: 1986
Systems: Car, train, truck
Context: Contemporary, Chickasaw perspective
After the deaths of her children, Roberta heads north toward Denver, but, because "it was fate that she missed the Denver turn-offs from the freeway," she settles in a town ironically named The Tropics. There she and another Chickasaw become involved or obsessed with collecting the debris of a consumer culture - plastic six-pack cans, worn-out shoes. A final symbol of the flawed grafting of Native American and white cultures comes through the narrator:
Once I saw a railroad engineer's hat in a museum. It was fully beaded. I thought it was a new style like the beaded tennis shoes or the new beaded truckers' hats. But it was made in the late 1800s when the Lakota were forbidden to make traditional items. The mothers took to beading whatever was available, hats of the engineers of death. They covered colony cotton with their art.
We make art out of our loss.
Roberta in Colorado is carving wooden birds, trying to carve her children's souls.
Edition used: Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing. Minnesota Humanities Commission and Minnesota Council of Teachers of English, 1991.
Author: Diane Glancy (b. 1941)
Title: "Without Title"
Date:
Systems: Car
Context: Contemporary; Cherokee perspective
The short poem verbally dramatizes the psychological meld between urban and reservation (or even open prairie) lives, embodied in the poet's father both hunting buffalo and working in the stockyards, and "I remember the animal tracks of his car / out the drive in snow and mud, / the aerial on his old car waving / like a bow string." The two lives and two times flow into the same images where the car supplies the metaphors for Native-American cultural memory.
Edition used: Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing. Minnesota Humanities Commission and Minnesota Council of Teachers of English, 1991.
Author: Lynne Tillman
Title: Motion Sickness
Date: 1991
Systems: Taxi, bus
Context: 1980s, travel in Europe and North Africa
As the title suggests, this book is very much about movement, specifically about travel. But rather than calling the book "travel literature" it would be more accurate to describe the (unnamed) woman narrator's account of her peregrinations across Europe (and into North Africa) as a story of tourism, of the struggle to understand her relationship to foreigners and foreignness. The narrator's movements are traced through a series of jump-cuts, each section titled by a different city, and ordered by association rather than chronologically, as one incident will remind the narrator of another, in another city, precipitating an immediate change of venue.
Surprisingly there is little description of how she moves from one location to another. However, there are a few telling examples (it could be assumed that descriptions of transportation might have become redundant). Chapter Four, "Twisted Intentions," for example, is almost completely devoted to an account of how she gets from London to Venice, a trip that involves a taxi ride, meals in train stations, several trains, and a ferry. What comes through in this chapter (and in an earlier description of a London bus ride) is the narrator's feeling that she is out of place and incompetent. She finds it difficult to negotiate the different and confusing, languages, currencies, and schedules. Once seated in each conveyance she's fine, but it's a struggle to get from one type of transportation to another, and to negotiate the demands of hunger and her other needs. In Chapter 6, "Indulgences," the narrator joins two English brothers on a car drive through Italy, a much more simple and leisurely trip because it takes place within a single country, and because she leaves the planning to the brothers. In this instance, the car (and the brothers) acts as a buffer between her and the strangeness of being in a foreign country.
Edition used: New York: Poseidon Press.
Author: Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947)
Title: Clay's Ark
Date: 1984
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary
Butler's near-future novel, is set in the remote desert areas of southern California, east of Los Angeles, in the year 2021. Social conditions have deteriorated to the point where most people either live in heavily protected "enclaves" (the abode of the rich), or in "sewers," incredibly violent descendents of inner-city ghettos. The "car age" is over, and only the rich, "private haulers," and various "parasites" still have automobiles. Cross-country travel is very limited and very dangerous, undertaken only by black market truckers and those nostalgic enough for road travel to take the attendant risks. The novel begins with Blake Maslin and his two teen-age daughters - in their restored (and fortified) Jeep Wagoneer - travelling from Needles to their home, Palos Verdes Enclave. But they are hijacked on the road and taken to a nearby ranch. It turns out that the group of ten or so people living at the ranch have been infected by an extraterrestrial organism that made its way to earth in the body of one man, Eli, who had been a member of a space expedition; his craft had crash-landed on the return to earth, and he was the only survivor. The organism combines with human cells and initially makes humans (especially men) very sick - many die. But it enhances the human capabilities - strength, eyesight, etc. of those that survive. The hitch is that it also creates a compulsion to pass on the organism to others. Further, the offspring of the infected people aren't quite human, but sort of cat-like quadruped versions of humans. In an effort to control the spread of the organism, Eli and his people occasionally pluck people off the road, infect them and make them a part of the group. The compulsion to infect others can not be denied or overcome, but the people at the ranch are trying to keep it under control, keep an epidemic at bay. The organism can "'drive you like a car,'" we learn, an apt metaphor considering the connection between cars and freedom in the novel.
Blake and his daughters, though they are already infected, manage to escape the ranch in the Wagoneer; but while fleeing they are captured by a "car family," one of the many outlaw gangs that roam the desert, preying on stray travelers and isolated ranchers. These people have no base, but literally live in their cars, nomadic predators capable of unbelievable cruelty and violence. They are at the other end of the car spectrum from Blake, who is wealthy enough to make a hobby of collecting cars, to indulge a nostalgia for a time of easier and safer travel; but in the hands of the car families, the car is no longer a vehicle of leisure, but both a home and a weapon. Blake manages to escape from the car family and reach a nearby road; but when he tries to flag down a truck, the hauler purposely runs him over, and then stops to rob the body. But Blake is not quite dead and he manages, against his will, to infect the hauler (by scratching his arm); though Eli's people go after the hauler, he escapes and takes the organism to L.A., beginning a worldwide epidemic. Eli and his people return to the ranch, isolated from the ensuing chaos. The car in the novel, in the hands of Blake, retains a hint of freedom, the joy of the open road; but Blake is one of the few wealthy enough to indulge a "hobby." For the most part the car has become a vehicle of predation and destruction, wielded by the outlaws that live along the highways and finally functioning as the means of spreading the organism. Though the heyday of the car has passed by 2021, it plays a central role in Butler's apocalyptic narrative, figuring largely in the violent and self-destructive fate of humanity.
Edition used: New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.
Author: Paule Marshall (b. 1929)
Title: Praisesong for the Widow
Date: 1984
Systems: Luxury cruise ship, steamboat, sailboat
Context: 1980s, New York, Caribbean, African-American perspective
Marshall's novel employs a journey motif to chart the spiritual and economic transformation of the well-to-do widow Avey Johnson. To the traditional psychological and geographical dimensions of the literary "voyage of discovery," Marshall adds the cultural-historical dimension of the African diaspora. The widow's travel via luxury liner and sailboat through the Caribbean becomes a symbolic repetition and reversal of the Middle Passage; recovering a personal history for Avey necessitates recovering the collective history of Africans and their descendants in the New World.
Three boat trips are at the center of this novel. Avey goes sour on her vacation cruise aboard the luxury liner Bianca Pride and disembarks; she hopes to find a quick flight from the port of this Caribbean island to New York. Instead she finds herself bound for the island of Carriacou on board the shabby sailing boat Emmanuel C. For Avey, this trip provides a "shock of recognition" and opens an extended memory of girlhood trips aboard the steamboat Robert Fulton up the Hudson River. These memories combine with earlier recollections of a great aunt's tales of the first Ibo people to land on Tatum Island, South Carolina.
The Bianca Pride, "huge, sleek, imperial" is described in the first five chapters (75 pages). Particular attention is given to the types of activity available on the ship and the caliber of society with which one mixes - Avey has packed six suitcases, a shoe caddy and hatbox for a two week cruise (Ch. 1: 1). Avey is unable to find privacy on a ship with fifteen hundred passengers, despite the apparently monstrous size of the vessel. Chapter Four mentions Decks One through Three in addition to the Sports Deck which offers billiards, golf links and a rifle range; also mentioned: a ballroom, several dining rooms, a library, space for a "floor show," as well as decks for passenger cabins. She travels with two companions also in their fifties; together they are the only three black persons on the voyage. This fact is crucial to Avey's departure. It is in the social chill of the Versailles room that the three dine and there where Avey is confronted with the fateful Peach Parfait à la Versailles. Sickened by her life of rich consumption, she can literally consume no more and is nauseated to the point where she decides to disembark.
Unable to catch a plane from her island port of call to New York, Avey strikes up conversation with islander Lebert Joseph (his name a play on Legba, West African lao - a god of wisdom and communication). Lebert whisks her away on the annual excursion "home" to Carriacou island, where employees of the tourist industry on one island, return home to perform traditional dances and "call their Nation."
The festive atmosphere at the wharf recalls for Avey the same festive, family-feeling which was part of summer riverboat excursions from Harlem up the Hudson to Bear Mountain Park (Ch. 3: 4). These one-day trips began at 6 AM on the pier, two hours before the S.S. Robert Fulton was to arrive. Avey's memory emphasizes the new clothes, "freshly marcelled" hair, fried chicken, potato salad and West Indian rice that made this an important social occasion. Of chief importance is the collective bond Avey would sense at these times, "for those moments, she became part of, indeed the center of, a huge wide confraternity."
Confraternity becomes the point of the Carriacou excursion which Avey joins some forty years later. Lebert's sailing ship, the Emmanuel C is shabby and dangerous, jam-packed with people, and sure to sink. In terms of plot this short two hour voyage marks a return to origins for Avey and the islanders. Symbolically, however, the ride resonates with the horror of slavers in the middle passage (see especially Ch. 3: 6). Avey experiences this juxtaposition of historical moments as a purge and rebirth; she loses control of all bodily functions in a way that infantilizes her even as it literally reverses the rich intake characteristic of her life to this point. She arrives on Carriacou "cleansed" and able to rethink her personal history in terms of the history of diaspora, economic exploitation and cultural assimilation of African peoples.
Edition used: New York: E.P. Dutton.
Author: Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
Title: The Bonfire of the Vanities
Date: 1987
Systems: Automobile, taxi, subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
The novel traces the consequences of an urban automobile accident as it affects the driver, passenger, and victim, and their families, friends, and co-workers, and ultimately the whole community (at least as much as New York City is affected by what people read in newspapers). The paper says "Two vastly different New Yorks collided when Wall Street investment banker Sherman McCoy's $50,000 Mercedes-Benz sports roadster struck [African-American] honor student Henry Lamb" (Ch. 23).
The fourth chapter is the account of the accident itself, one of the most detailed in American literature. It starts when Sherman picks up his mistress, Maria Ruskin, from Kennedy airport, and they have to figure out how to get her collection of designer luggage into the roadster, "He had to stack half of it up on the back seat, which wasn't much more than an upholstered ledge. Terrific, thought Sherman. If I have to stop short, I'll get hit in the base of the skull by matched flying cream-colored vanity cases with chocolate-brown trim." The drive toward Manhattan, in the "tide of red taillights," seems routine until he becomes confused by the hopeless signage and tangle of approaches to the bridges and expressways: "His sense of direction was slipping away. He must be heading north still. The down side of the bridge hadn't curved a great deal. But now there were only signs to go by. His entire stock of landmarks was gone, left behind. At the end of the bridge the expressway split into a Y. MAJOR DEEGAN GEO. WASHINGTON BRIDGE … BRUCKNER NEW ENGLAND … Major Deegan went upstate … No! … Veer right … Suddenly another Y … EAST BRONX NEW ENGLAND … EAST 138TH BRUCKNER BOULEVARD … Choose one, you ninny!" [Wolfe's suspension dots]. Once off the expressway and wandering block after block through South Bronx slums, they try unsuccessfully to follow any cues they can, all the time ironically under an unidentifiable expressway. The accident itself seems, on evidence later in the book, to have been caused when two black youths place a tire in a side street with an eye toward stopping the Mercedes and robbing its occupants (Ch. 29). When Sherman gets out to move the barrier, Maria takes the wheel; in their effort to escape, the car hits one of the youths. The social and moral dilemma is whether they dare to report the hit-and-run, an act which would surely become public or at least would come to the attention of Maria's and Sherman's spouses. It's also not clear if Sherman should (Gatsby-like) say he was driving, should the issue emerge.
Aside from this accident and crime, automobile debris is a regular part of the New York landscape. Just on the way from the airport, Sherman and Maria pass "an enormous two-door sedan, the sort of car they used to make in the 1970s, up against a stone retaining wall" and "another abandoned car by the side of the road. The wheels were gone, the hood was up, and two figures, one holding a flashlight, were jackknifed over the engine well" (Ch. 4). When we first meet the two detectives, Martin and Goldberg, they are investigating "where a man had been shot to death in the back of an automobile. The automobile was a Cadillac Sedan DeVille.… Kramer looked in, and what he saw was horrible beyond anything the phrase 'shot to death in the back of an automobile' had even begun to suggest to him" (Ch. 6).
The case to solve the hit-and-run is gradually developed by police detectives and the district attorney's office, with considerable pressure from the African-American community. It initially depends on car-related clues, chiefly a partly-seen license plate number and the make of Sherman's car. The DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) list has 500 Mercedes-Benzes in the state whose plates begin with the right letters, but only 124 from the city or Westchester county (Ch. 12). As Sherman reads the newspaper accounts he realizes that the identification is getting closer, until, even his young daughter makes the connection (Ch. 13). The other main clue is the garage where he spends $410 per month per car for the Mercedes and his Mercury station wagon. (The policeman who tracks the Mercedes down and finds out that it had been used the night of the crime notices that these fees are more than he pays for his house [Ch. 16].) At one point in the legal proceedings, Sherman tries to convince his lawyer that his Mercedes isn't really a luxury car; it's "'like a Buick used to be'" (Ch. 12).
Wolfe also comments, although in less detail, on public transportation in New York. The taxis at 79th Street and Fifth Avenue "take the young Masters of the Universe down to Wall Street" for ten dollars. Despite the regulations which require drivers to go anywhere, from this location they "wouldn't budge unless you were going down to Wall Street or close to it." Sherman appreciates the cabs, since they provide "Isolation!" from "the trenches of the urban wars" (Ch. 3). Later, Sherman and his wife hire a "black Buick sedan" from Mayfair Town Car, Inc., to go to a party which is six blocks away, so "walking was out of the question." It would be ok to go there by cab, but he would lose face to hail one to get home. The cost is $246.50 for the five hours. Outside the party there are so many limousines that it is hard to get to the curb; the really wealthy own their limos, hire a chauffeur for $36,000 a year, and incur other costs of $14,000.
Sherman does not take the subway to work, but his father does, as a "matter of principle. The more grim the subways became, the more graffiti those people scrawled on the cars, the more gold chains they snatched off girls' necks, the more old men they mugged, the more women they pushed in front of the trains, the more determined was John Campbell McCoy that they weren't going to drive him off the New York City subways" (Ch. 3). Early in the novel, District Attorney Lawrence Kramer is seen catching the D train from 81st Street and Central Park West to his office in the Bronx. He "stood in the aisle holding on to a stainless-steel pole while the car bucked and lurched and screamed. On the plastic bench across from him sat a bony old man who seemed to be growing like a fungus out of a backdrop of graffiti. He was reading a newspaper.… Half the people in the car were wearing sneakers with splashy designs on them and molded soles that looked like gravy boats…. on the D train the reason way, they were cheap. On the D train these sneakers were like a sign around the neck reading SLUM or EL BARRIO." Presumably a full account of the subway system would lead to similar examples of dress patterns and their correlation with social class, and other factors (Ch. 2).
Maria the mistress' husband, Arthur Ruskin, "a little Jew from Cleveland," delivers "a long soliloquy about the many roads he had traveled in his career and about the many forks in those roads." His dinner companion, a reporter, hears an account of his air charter business which was developed during the Energy Crisis of the early 1970s. In his dialect, "'Efry focking Arab who wants to go to Mecca, I'm gonna take him there.'" He first leases three worn-out Electras, but eventually winds up with "Kosher 747s." He gets Arab travel agents to find customers who will "squeeze the price of an airplane ticket out of their pitiful possessions in order to make the magical pilgrimage." They bring their live chickens and lambs to the airport, so Ruskin lets them bring the animals on board, but puts down a plastic shield to protect the rugs; they are "flying nomads on a plastic desert." Once a plane went off the runway at Mecca, an accident which panicked the crew, but not the ignorant passengers who think it is normal, "'that's the way you stop an airplane!'" Ruskin's laughter at this episode leads to his fatal heart attack, which leads nicely to the "traffic jam" of waiters and customers and so on in the aisles of the restaurant (Ch. 26). Like much of Wolfe's writing, this chapter combines understated reportage of improbably coincidental events with a series of metaphoric comments to achieve wry social commentary.
Edition used: Toronto: Bantam, 1988.
Author: Larry Brown (b. 1951)
Title: "Boy and Dog"
Date: 1984
Systems: Car - Mustang
Context: Contemporary
This story consists of about three hundred lines, each a short, simple sentence, and recounts the events that follow when a '65 Mustang runs over an eight-year-old boy's dog. While the boy mourns the dead dog, the driver returns to search for a missing hubcap. Hiding behind a tree, the boy throws a brick at the driver, striking him in the head; the Mustang crashes into another tree and after a few moments bursts into flames. People stop, someone tries unsuccessfully to rescue the driver, some ineffectual fire fighters arrive, as does the media. The boy watches it all. The story is told in grisly detail but is undeniably funny, ending with the observation that "Kids are violent these days. / Especially where pets are concerned."
Edition used: Facing the Music: Stories. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1988.
Author: Ted Mooney (b. 1951)
Title: Easy Travel to Other Planets
Date: 1980
Systems: Airplane, car
Context: 1980s, New York City
The setting of this novel is New York City and the Virgin Islands, but the time is not entirely clear. For the most part it is obviously the present, but there are a few peripheral yet persistent aspects of the narrative that make the world of the book strange. For instance, the world is moving toward war because of unresolved disputes over the sovereignty of Antarctica; another unfamiliar detail is the prevalence of something called "information sickness," a disease whose debilitating symptoms (bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, etc.) can be brought on any time, supposedly because of the general overload of stimuli in the modern world - recovery is accomplished by assuming the "memory-elimination posture." Though the novel is most directly about two couples and their difficult relationships (the main character Nicole develops a relationship with a dolphin - she's a dolphin researcher - that at one point involves a sexual encounter; this causes a dilemma for her [human] lover, Jeffrey), the highly technologized information society - particularly as manifested by transportation technologies - in which these relationships are played out is crucial to the narrative.
For example, one of the other main characters, Melissa, has a TWA pass that allows her to fly anywhere in the world at any time for free. Her lover, Diego, resents this access to travel and presses her to marry him (she will lose the pass if she marries). Many scenes depict different characters picking up or dropping off others at airports and the flight experience itself. The terminals in particular are a persistent element in the story, their similar architecture at one point described as meant to "dilute the alarming wonder of flight." Easy Travel plays on the anxiety generated by an ever faster paced world, and that pace is certainly accelerated by air travel. Cars also play a role in the novel, particularly through the importance to the plot of several accidents (there is also a lengthy scene at a NASCAR race - the Fossil Fuel 250). In the denouement of the book, Nicole, riding in Diego's cab, opens the door of the cab and steps "delicately out into traffic," where she's run over "several times." Finally, the last image of the novel involves a car, as Melissa watches her terminally ill mother (who has just dropped her off at the train station) "backing out of the station at a speed that seems, then and at all other moments, incredible." It's that speed that Mooney is largely concerned with, how it affects the lives of his characters.
Edition used: New York: Ballentine, 1983.
Author: Don DeLillo (b. 1936)
Title: White Noise
Date: 1985
Systems: Automobiles
Context: Contemporary, Midwest
Set in a small Midwestern college town, this novel follows the lives of Jack Gladney (a professor of Hitler Studies and the narrator), his wife Babette, and their four children, all offspring of former marriages. The central event of the story is an industrial accident that forces the Gladney's to evacuate their home, but this incident is just one element of a dense narrative that examines many facets of contemporary American culture, including supermarkets, television, and car crashes. What most permeates the book, however, is an obsession with death, its myriad manifestations as well as it inevitability. At the same time White Noise is a comic novel, a grimly funny account of modern America.
Automobiles are a constant presence in the novel, particularly as a significant marker of family. In the opening scene of the story a line of station wagons, "like a desert caravan," arrives at the college for the fall semester; parents bring their children and their children's possessions and all meet in a communal gathering that "tells the parents that they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation." In another scene the car functions as sort of rolling dining room, as the Gladney family sit packed together eating fast food.
However, cars in the novel are most often connected to death, to the fear of and fascination with mortality. For example, there is a lengthy description of the Gladneys and others having to evacuate their homes because of a nearby train wreck which has spawned a huge toxic cloud; they drive through incredible traffic, to a Boy Scout barracks that has been designated as an evacuation center. Later the barracks must be abandoned as the toxic cloud nears, and chaos ensues as all the cars try to leave at once, to flee death. In another scene a professor of "American environments" discusses his seminar on cinematic car crashes, and encourages his students to "look past the violence" and see the complex and fiery crashes as examples "of the old 'can-do' spirit," a spirit of "innocence and fun." The car wreck has become an academic subject.
Finally, in the last chapter of the book, Babette's youngest child, two and half-year-old Wilder, manages to get out of the yard and ride his tricycle to a nearby highway, which he proceeds to cross. The scene is described at length as Wilder somehow manages to pedal across the first three lanes, push the bike across the grassy median, and then ride across the other three lanes. Coming at the end of the novel, Wilder's dash through traffic signifies the constant and very real threat of death and yet the miraculous ability of people to fend it off - at least for a while.
Edition used: New York: Penguin, 1986.
Author: Kurt Vonnegut (b. 1922)
Title: Hocus Pocus
Date: 1990
Systems: Automobile, motorcycle
Context: 1970s to 1991, New York state
The fictional narrator, Eugene Debs Hartke, talks about automobiles by brand names throughout, including his Mercedes (a gift from the mother of a rich student he rescued), a prison warden's Isuzu, a Toyota hearse, a very expensive Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, a twelve-year old Buick which needs an $850 transmission job, and so on. Vonnegut assumes that his readers know the costs and prestige-values of these vehicles, imported and domestic.
A couple of curious, vehicle-related customs from the 1980s are pointed out. "Coring," removing the valve stem to flatten a tire, is performed by drunk high school students on Hartke's Mercedes and all other expensive cars on campus at one point (Ch. 14) and on Hartke's car alone several times later. The local café features "prostitutes in vans in the parking lot out back," an extreme variant of the cultural constant which associates cars and sex (Ch. 28, 35).
The novel is set is Scipio, New York, the home of the Mohiga Wagon Company which, in 1830, made the "sturdiest and most popular" Conestoga wagons that "carried freight and settlers across the prairies." The founder of that company founded the college where Hartke now teaches. His son, Elias, "wrote a technical account of the construction of the Onondaga Canal," a link to the Erie Canal; the Onondaga is filled in and is now Route 53. This playful history, in the second chapter, shows how the novel's locale is ironically central yet isolated from the rest of America.
Incidentally, the system of closed-circuit televisions used to monitor the prison resembles the portholes on an ocean liner, and "Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course" (Ch. 31).
Edition used: New York: Berkley Books, 1991.
Author: Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940)
Title: Spence + Lila
Date: 1988
Systems: Automobile, plane
Context: Contemporary, Kentucky
This is a self-consciously educational novel about the medical treatment for breast cancer and mastectomy. The main setting is a hospital in Paducah where Lila undergoes various diagnoses and treatments while her husband, Spence, and children negotiate their trips between the hospital and the family farm. The first page has Spence notice road signs, like the old Burma-Shave sequences - his car has a hole in the muffler; the seatbelts are cut off to deactivate the warning buzzer. Along the ride he notices an ad at a gas station for free Coke with a tune up (Ch. 1). This sort of detail, involving some ironic symbolism about the dangers of riding in a car with simple backdrop about contemporary culture, is frequent in the book. While waiting to hear the biopsy results, Spence drives to a Wal-Mart store to get windshield washer fluid and wiper blades, but temporarily gets disoriented in the parking lot until he finds his car (Ch. 7).
In another symbolic passage, as Lila is awaiting her second operation, she thinks that "Growing into old age toward death is like shifting gears in a car; now she's going into high gear, plowing out onto one of those interstates, racing into the future" (Ch. 17).
Daughter Nancy arrives by plane, although the flight is delayed because of fog in Boston. Later, during confusion following the mastectomy, Lila isn't sure whether Nancy came from New York or Boston, a passing comment which points out how domestic flights are roughly similar in time and how little the source matters to the people who greet their relatives (Ch. 14).
The family crisis brings out retrospective moments. Lila recalls their eloping in Spence's old Ford with a rattling door and blinking headlights (Ch. 15). While Spence is talking about leaving the farm to his kids, a "jet plane flies over, leaving a white scar"; he then recalls scary experiences he had during World War II (Ch. 17).
Edition used: New York: Harper & Row.
Author: Mary Higgins Clark (b. 1931)
Title: A Cry in the Night
Date: 1982
Systems: Car, airplane
Context: Contemporary, Minnesota and New York city
This novel is a typical "national best seller" from the late twentieth century. We are told throughout about the details of the characters' upscale culture, and these include frequent (and unexceptional) references to their cars and driving. The novel starts in New York where city life is characterized on the negative side by watching three filled buses pass and having to walk, and on the positive by Jenny's estranged husband picking her up in a limo for dinner at the Four Seasons. Jenny and her kids move to a new marriage with Erich, a famous artist, in Greater Minnesota - the transition is pointed out by the in-flight announcement, "We are crossing over Green Bay, Wisconsin. Our altitude is thirty thousand feet…"
In rural Minnesota the realistic details include mention of County Road 26, the joys of having no traffic lights, cleared highways in the winter, and so on. Jenny's former husband, who gets an acting job at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, calls to get directions so he can visit his children; later he borrows another actor's car in a family emergency. As part of the mystery in the story, he is killed on the way, having missed a turn and driving into the ice-covered river and drowning. The car key is part of the inquest evidence. As the mystery deepens, a canceled airplane reservation, tire tracks in the snow, and a car rented in Duluth play their roles in the story. Predictably, brand names are mentioned frequently - Erich's Cadillac and his four-year-old Chrysler station wagon (and Bisquick coffee cake and Jane Pauly on "Good Morning America").
These details from television culture and the brand names resonate with the readers' experiences, whether directly or informed by advertising and other media.
Edition used: New York: Dell, 1983.
Author: Susan Rogers Cooper
Title: The Man in the Green Chevy: A Milt Kovak Mystery
Date: 1988
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Oklahoma
Milton Kovak is the homicide unit head for a rural county sheriff's office in Oklahoma. He got the job because he was the only official who didn't vomit at the "big wreck out on Interstate 12." Oklahoma Highway 5 is a constant presence in the book, for trips to investigate the suspects' alibis, the path between the Prophesy County Sheriff's Office and Milt's lover's house, and, occasionally, the site of wrecks, some fatal, others trivial (Ch. 12, 13). Milt uses the squad car, but its repairs are six months overdue, owing to budget problems, and his personal, reliable '55 Chevy four-door (known at times as "the '55) which he had owned since high school (Ch. 2).
In this modern detective novel, people are linked to their cars and driving habits by the police. In the opening chapters, Milt and others in the community identify friends and suspects by their physical appearance and, always, their cars. The ongoing dilemma is to find the man in an old, green '70 Chevy Impala with a bad muffler and rust stains. Laura Johnson, who says she had seen the killer, has an "antique" VW van, blue and white with the original paint job (Ch. 1). Milt's '55 also has the original paint job and "Original seats, covered in plastic to keep 'em original" (Ch. 3). Police checks on suspects always include information about outstanding parking tickets and speeding violations - often that is all which the computer-based files contain (e.g., Ch. 8). David Perry and the Mays family in Tulsa is under suspicion, and Milt's efforts to nail down their alibis involves his interviewing neighbors about which cars had been at the house over the key weekend - a teenager across the street had not seen the Mayses' car, and he would have noticed because he liked the vehicle (Ch. 6).
This is a world whose topography is car- and street-centered. Directions for Milt to find an abandoned '73 green Chevy are quite precise: "I pulled off Highway 5 at FM 217, went 2.7 miles by the odometer, took a left onto an oiled-clay side road, drove .35 miles and turned left again onto a rutted dirt road. The grass growing up in the middle of the two tire tracks was so high it was obvious the road wasn't used often, if at all" (Ch. 8). Of course, the number of green Chevys is enormous, which makes the original claim credible, the discovery of the false clue likely, and the final revelation that the Chevy never existed equally credible.
Edition used: Toronto: Worldwide Mystery, 1991.
Author: Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
Title: The Crown of Columbus
Date: 1991
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, New Hampshire and the Caribbean
The Dartmouth College academic couple (in pursuit of the Crown and other Columbiana) incidentally drive around in ordinary automobiles. We get a couple of technical details, such as the inconvenience when Vivian has to extend the seat belt to accommodate her late-stage pregnancy [one of the earliest seat belts in American literature], the rushed ride to the hospital for delivery "He had managed the drive that took me over half an hour on the very best of days, in eighteen minutes…. I was in the car before the next contraction" (Ch. 5). Soon after Violet is born, her mother takes her to visit her father, and she "unhooked the safety belt around her car seat [another first?] and brought her into her [unmarried] father's home" (Ch. 6).
Jeeps are used on the Caribbean island of Eleuthera, characterized by "Poor soil, bright colors, dark people, junked automobiles" (Ch. 11). Roger, the father, intellectualizes: "I despise a clutch that slips. A vehicle is the extension of oneself, the four-wheeled face one presents to the world, the ectoskeleton upon which one depends both for attracting others and for protection, if necessary, from them. A car announces its occupants. The medium is the message, the means that justifies the end. When air travel deprives me of my vintage Saab - understated, elegant, secure - I don't begrudge the extra money spent for a quality rental…. I actually like leasing, the variety of exploring the gadgets of each new model: cruise control, electric mirrors, the random-scan button on the radio." The Caribbean, it turns out, has wound up with "a detritus of enormous, Detroit-made clunkers [which] had been blown to the island off shore." Roger's hopes for a new car are dashed, since what his high rental fee gets him is the "twin of the car in which I had ridden to my girlfriend's public high school senior prom. It was vaguely Chevrolet, tan and broad, with treadless tires as smooth and inflated as inner tubes. The upholstery of the bench front seat - how odd the antique phraseology lay in wait at the back of one's mind - told tales of melodrama and passion, of passengers carrying sharp objects in their back pockets and drivers who ignored the ashtray when they smoked" (Ch. 15). Roger's attention to marketing details lets him observe this historical regression in the history of automobiling, and it matches the historical quest which is the main plot of the novel.
Edition used: New York: Harper Collins.
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