Description:
"You pay for your mistakes in racing," one of Jonis Agee's characters tells us. "You miss the set-up and take the wall." As one might expect, her short story collection Taking the Wall is full of men and women paying for their mistakes--not to mention their dreams, obsessions, and even ordinary bad luck. In this case, all four frequently boil down to the same thing: cars. The narrator of "You Know I Am Lying" sells the family farm to keep racing; the NASCAR devotee in "The Pop-Off Valve" ignores his marriage while his wife contemplates an affair; and the crippled ex-driver of "Over the Point of Cohesion" can't stop recalculating the mechanics of his final crash. Even their families aren't exempt from the madness. Managing a salvage business while her husband races, the narrator of "Good to Go" looks out over 20 acres of junked cars and has her own, peculiarly automotive Proustian moment: "It only took ten days to get us married. I was sixteen. Donnie was nineteen. But that isn't the car I'm talking about." These stories inevitably start with a rush ("I'm sorry, I always go with men with bad teeth, I want to tell my daughter, who is sobbing long distance at one thirty in the morning") and end just when you think they've left the gate ("He hoped that somehow, when he finally crawled into bed tonight, he could think of a way to convince Marie that he was as much Elvis as she might want or need on Christmas Day"). In between, the prose careens forward at a truly vertiginous speed, as Agee's characters learn that sometimes domestic life is the most spectacular car crash of all. You don't have to be a NASCAR fan to appreciate these powerful, fast-moving tales--just a student of human nature and its boundless ability to endure. --Mary Park
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