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Taking the Wall: Short Stories
by: Jonis Agee
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| List Price: |
EUR 14,50 |
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| Price: |
EUR 13,95 |
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| Edition: |
Paperback |
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| ASIN: |
1566890888 |
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| Publisher: |
Coffee House Press; 01 October, 1999 |
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| ISBN: |
1566890888 |
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| Avg. rating: |
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| 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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Taking the Wall--Grabbing the Dream
Taking the Wall is a selection of short stories about the dreams and aspirations of all the would-be Nascar racers across the southern states of America. Jonis Agee has captured the thrill of winning, but more often the frustration of not being to make it to the big one whether it be car failure, money, or skill. But to these backyard racers, there is always the next one. Maybe the car won't take the wall this time and the frustrated racer will finally win.Racing is an obsession to them and because of it families will crumble and divorces will ensue. But this does not deter the racer. He will follow his dream to the end. Three paragraphs really jumped out at me while reading this book of short stories. One in "The First Obligation":"I mean a whole life can't come down to this collection of furniture and photographs, like a bunch of trophies you win in go-cart for just showing up--what kind of a race is that? I mean the sun's going down, my car engine's blown, and I can't even remember enough of my life to cry good tears over it. I feel like I'm rolling loose, about to hit the wall again, and no one's looking anymore."And later"A dream is something you die for," she'd told him, and he'd looked at her, lying drained of blood as if her own dream and not his father's was the thing he should fear. He'd understood then that she loved her husband, that his father hadn't forced her to what was her death bed, she had climbed into it herself. They were lucky, these two people, his parents, he'd come to realize over the next few years. Lucky because they';d been true to their dreams and because they knew what those dreams were. Recognized them out of all the others that must have presented themselves like dancers at the dance." and finally in the short story, "Mystery Numbers":"Late summer when Dale Earnhardt had driven into the wall at the start of the Mountain Dew Southern 500, they said he experienced 'a transient alteration of his consciousness.' Tom was thinking he needed one of those, but hoped it wouldn't take a smack in the wall to do it." These men (and women) always hope that they will be one day up there with the Earnhardts, the LaBontes, the Martins. That is not the main reason, though. It is the car. It is the love of the car and the need for speed. And they keep trying.
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Beyond the Race Track Wall
This book takes the wall, and keeps going. Flashes of grace illuminate these stories of workaday people who dream of something more. Agee's blue-collar characters come out of the curve in terribly mixed up and out-of-control circumstances, and nearly always manage to grab the wheel and steer the course. If only we all had their sense of direction. Take this book for a spin--it handles well.
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