Book Review

Drivers
by Nathan Leslie
Hamilton Stone Editions
http://www.hamiltonstone.org/index.html
ISBN: 978-0-9714873-5-2.

It's an understatement to say that we Americans love cars. They embody our physical vastness as a country and our spiritual appetites for flash, for fast motion, for freedom. Nathan Leslie's third collection of short stories, Drivers, is the latest work to examine the connection between the automobile and our psyches. "Drivers," of course, literally, signifies every protagonist in the stories here. Not only do they drive, but they're learning to drive, they're teaching others to drive, they're driving others, they're scared to drive. Many collect cars or models; some even study traffic patterns. However, their connections to driving run much deeper than the physical act; ironically, most, if not all, in the land of freedom and progress, of superhighways and Hemmys, are stuck in emotional landscapes of congestion, accidents, and near misses.

Leslie has a gifted eye for the width and breadth of the imperfect humans he places on these pages. Some are touching, like his father and daughter team in "The Driving Lesson," some try to make contact despite their opposite poles, such as Amos and his stepsister Dina in "The Mood Ring," and others are plain unlikable, like Kelvin the adulterer in "Oh Deusenberg" or Radford Buckley, the entrepreneurial driving instructor of "The Hit and Run." Leslie's characters are all unique in strange ways—the details he sprinkles onto them are akin to paint chips and dings in otherwise sturdy fleet of cars.

Leslie is at his best when he's not trying too hard. "Flyboys Down the Big End," which takes place in the pits and dust of 1950s drag racing, has a loose and energetic feel, with loud, shiny masculine prose that brings the reader right to the edge of the track, amidst the sights of smoke and the smells of nitro. Although the story meanders along in its time frame and putters out a bit at the ending, Leslie's racers and erstwhile reporter burn on the page like smoldering Deans and Brandos of the fifties.

Similarly, in "Cog," Leslie is able to weave the trials of communication in a mid-lap, two-child marriage alongside the narrator Jesse's penchant for stock car racing, a meticulous sport based on, like a marriage or even life, making high-speed turns and passing other cars lap after lap without wiping out ("Jesse knows the main goal here is to stay on the track at some reasonable speed. If Jesse could just do that, he would be in great shape.").

Other stories are, so to speak, doomed from the start. "29 Old Yancy West," the story of a spurned, aging lover and his chaffeur, is a decent-enough story of lost love and intrigue. However, Leslie gets too cute with rhetorical devices, gumming up an already somewhat-vague story. For instance, the reader enters the story at the end before starting at the beginning in the next paragraph, making it difficult to piece together what is happening. The story is further complicated when Leslie needlessly shifts the narrator Perry's perspective from third person to first person midway without rhyme or reason, a device that also is used in at least one other story, to confusing results.

Good prose, like a clean house, shouldn't be noticed, and that is a problem in a few of the stories in Drivers. In addition to the problems already mentioned, Leslie sometimes lapses into metatext, or "tell" (as opposed to show), a sloppiness that should have been honed by the third draft or so: "Perry wondered what was going on here. Mr Fillister’s reactions. This man bolting back into the house. Mr. Fillisters reasons why he couldn't or wouldn't tell Perry were his own. Perry could tell something was certainly askew." I also found myself rearranging opening paragraphs of several stories while reading them to smooth out odd interruptions in flow. At one's third collection of short stories, it would seem that some of these kinks would be ironed out, or at least caught by a seasoned editor (the book is published by the respectable Hamilton Stone Press). Or maybe Leslie should, like the flyboys down at the big end, worry less about complexity and nuance and just fly out on all cylinders. Aside from a few false starts, however, the stories in Drivers take the reader on familiar journeys where, in the end, the trip is more important than the destination.