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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