Marcy Dermansky. (2016). The Red Car: A Novel. Liveright.

Marcy Dermansky. 2016. The Red Car: A Novel. Liveright.

Marcy Dermansky, The Red Car: A Novel. Liveright, 2016.

Marcy Dermansky. The Red Car: A Novel. Liveright, 2016.

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   • fileAs: Dermansky, Marcy
   • bioText: Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney's, Salon, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey with her daughter.
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The Red Car

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Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Library Journal

"Sharp and fiery.... There is, now, a literary term for a book you can't stop reading.... It is The Red Car." —New York Times Book Review

In her "dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups" (People), celebrated novelist Marcy Dermansky offers a biting exploration of a woman's search for self-realization and models of a life well lived. When Leah's former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah her most prized possession—a flashy red sports car—the shock forces Leah to reevaluate her whole life. Leah is living in Queens with a husband she doesn't love and a list of unfulfilled ambitions. Returning to San Francisco to claim the mysteriously powerful car, she revisits past lives and loves in several sprawling days colored by sex and sorrow.

Dermansky evokes an edgy, capricious, and beautifully haunting heroine—one whose search for realization is as wonderfully unpredictable and hypnotic as the twists and turns of the Pacific Coast Highway. Tautly wound, transgressive, and mordantly funny, The Red Car is an incisive exploration of one woman's unusual route to self-discovery.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Daniel Handler;The New York Times Book Review
   • content: Sharp and fiery...The novel's furious action keeps the pages snapping by, but each incident, at times each sentence, is bubbling with equally furious ideas...There is, now, a literary term for a book you can't stop reading that makes you stop to think. It is The Red Car.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Maddie Crum;Huffington Post
   • content: A swift and magical read . . . . Spare, funny and deftly observant of what happens when our repressed emotions reach a violent precipice.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times
   • content: Pitch-perfect novel...Sprinkled with dark humor and many literary references, Dermansky's novel is ultimately one of compassion, optimism, and fierce feminism, in which an unmoored young woman enmeshed in bad relationships with men resets her life path.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Natalie Bakopoulos;San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: The Red Car is melancholy and introspective, but sharply witty and transgressive too, and it's full of the intrepid gestures I so love in fiction, both by the characters and the writing itself. There's a particular intellectual and emotional gratification to be found in this smart novel that so wonderfully blurs boundaries of reality, of past and present, of time and space. The Red Car is a remarkable book.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Amy Brady;Chicago Review of Books
   • content: Dermansky's writing is taut and smart. And it's a thrill to cheer on Leah, that admirable badass, wherever the red car takes her next.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Roxane Gay, author of The Untamed State and Bad Feminist
   • content: I've been waiting and waiting for a new book from Marcy Dermansky and finally that new book is here. The Red Car is taut and smart and strange and sweet and perfect. I want to eat this book or sew it to my skin or something.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me
   • content: Marcy Dermansky's The Red Car is a wonder. Moving, mysterious and filled with dark, sly humor, it rustles under your skin and stays there. By the time I reached its shimmering final pages, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and start again.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
   • content: There are few writers who can do what Marcy Dermansky does so effortlessly in The Red Car, the way she pushes this story in such surprising and thrilling directions, never losing control, taking your breath away line by beautiful line. Dermansky writes with such unnerving clarity about grief, not just for the loss of a loved one, but for our own unexpected lives. A strange, unflinching, utterly amazing novel.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Edan Lepucki, author of California
   • content: A new book by the inimitable Marcy Dermansky is worth cheering for. The Red Car is droll, unflinching, and mysterious, a feat of efficient storytelling. I could not put it down. This novel mesmerized me.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
    • content: I've long admired the work of Marcy Dermansky, and her latest is an absolute stunner. The Red Car is the very rare kind of novel that—with its urgency and intrigue and deep intelligence—will pin you to your chair and transport you utterly. Stop what you're doing and read this book.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Cari Luna, author of The Revolution of Every Day
    • content: Don't be fooled by The Red Car's brevity: it packs a serious punch. Dermansky's vision is sharp and clear, pushing her beautifully realized protagonist, Leah, into the rapids on a journey of self-discovery. And we're right there at her side, breathless, as she shakes herself awake. A tremendously moving story that feels true and important.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus (Starred Review)
    • content: In vivid, dreamlike prose. . . . Dermansky delivers a captivating novel about the pursuit of joy that combines dreamlike logic with dark humor, wry observation, and gritty feminism.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly
    • content: Sleek and polished . . . . Dermansky's short, punchy chapters keep the tightly written novel moving smoothly along, and flashbacks to her past add depth without slowing momentum.
14. • premium: False
    • source: Andrea Kempf;Library Journal
    • content: [Dermansky's] latest explores the many unwise decisions of her heroine, offering no solutions but encouraging us to hope that things will get better. Readers won't be able to put this one down.
15. • premium: False
    • source: Marion Winik;Newsday
    • content: Dry, entertaining and crookedly insightful. . . . [The Red Car] is on one level, a fairy tale complete with fairy godmother, and on another, a whispered goad to the reader: Live the life you really want.
16. • premium: False
    • source: Doree Shafrir;Buzzfeed
    • content: With the release of her incandescent...
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2016
      In the sleek and polished third novel by the author of Bad Marie, aspiring novelist Leah receives the bequest of the titular vehicle from her former boss Judy, killed when a driver runs a red light. Leah, 33 and unhappily married to the perhaps too-conveniently villainous Hans, whom she married when they were both graduate students and he needed a green card, takes off from Queens for San Francisco to retrieve the car. There follows a series of surreal adventures with old coworkers, a college friend “worth insane amounts of money,” a hippie mechanic, and a motel receptionist, as Leah begins to imagine the possibility of a happier future for herself. Dermansky’s short, punchy chapters keep the tightly written novel moving smoothly along, and flashbacks to her past add depth without slowing momentum. When fantasy elements—such as the fact that Leah constantly hears the deceased Judy talking to her, as well as the alleged “haunting” of a car that wants its drivers to exceed the speed limit—threaten to steer the novel off course, the author brings it sharply back in line with snappy dialogue and a great ending.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Shocked by the death of her former boss, a young writer leaves her life in New York for a second chance at happiness in San Francisco.When Leah learns that her boss, Judy, died in a fatal traffic accident and left her a red sports car, she decides to travel back to San Francisco to pay her respects. Soon, though, it's clear that Leah's trip is about more than saying goodbye to Judy and revisiting her West Coast haunts. Until an argument with her husband, Hans, turned physical, Leah didn't realize how stultifying her marriage--which provided Hans with a green card--actually was. "Why did it feel like my life had stopped once I had gotten married?" Leah asks herself, struggling to understand which partnerships--and their domestic trappings--feel "like the right way to live." Now, with Judy's voice carefully commenting on her every move from beyond the grave, Leah follows the signs she believes Judy has left for her. We meet a butch lesbian named Lea; former officemates; a Deadhead mechanic; grad school compatriots; a tech billionaire with a major crush; and a beautiful thief waiting to start her life in Big Sur. In vivid, dreamlike prose, Dermansky (Bad Marie, 2010, etc.) shows us how easy it is to feel like a ghost in your own life--and how difficult it can be to fight your way back to your body. It's no accident that Dermansky's nods to literature and pop culture serve as delightful signposts of surrealism--there are strains of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami novels, HBO's Six Feet Under and psychedelic drug use. At times it's difficult to tell who is haunting whom--whether Judy is haunting Leah or Leah walks like a specter through her past life in order to--finally--build a future that makes her feel alive. Dermansky delivers a captivating novel about the pursuit of joy that combines dreamlike logic with dark humor, wry observation, and gritty feminism. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2016
      

      When Leah Caplan, an aspiring novelist, learns that Judy, her mentor and former boss, has died in an automobile accident, she boards a plane to California to attend the funeral. Upon arrival, Leah discovers that she has inherited her friend's red car--the car in which she died. As she reluctantly takes possession of the vehicle, Leah constantly hears Judy's voice in her head, advising her on to what to do next. The car terrifies her, seeming to have a life of its own, refusing to slow down on highways, and even appearing to repair itself after the accident. When Leah finds her old journal, hidden in the car she begins to reexamine the life she had left behind in California and its meaning to her in the present. VERDICT Dermansky, whose previous novels Twins and Bad Marie focused on young women who make poor choices in the course of maturing, has done it again. Her latest explores the many unwise decisions of her heroine, offering no solutions but encouraging us to hope that things will get better. Readers won't be able to put this one down. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16; an ALA Buzz Book.]--Andrea Kempf, formerly with Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

20. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2016
      Ardent fans of Dermansky's delectably wicked novel Bad Marie (2010) will pounce on her newest succinct and nervy tale about a young woman of dubious moral standing stumbling through life. An aspiring writer, Leah ends up in San Francisco, reluctantly working in an office where she accepts her coworkers' contempt and is baffled by her kind boss, Judy, who buys a blindingly red sports car that Leah finds sinister. Ten years later, at the start of the twenty-first century, Leah is living in Queens, unhappily married to a writer from Austria, when the red car reenters her life and propels her on a harrowing tour of her past. Dermansky is vigilantly observant, hot-wire funny, and sharply attuned to failures to empathize and the impulse to lie. There is much here that is satisfyingly canny, but Leah can be a drag, and some aspects of her misadventures, while meant to be cuttingly subversive, instead feel forced. Still, Dermansky is a gutsy storyteller, and this is an eerie, psychologically astute tale of a woman mysteriously goaded into changing her life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Library Journal

"Sharp and fiery.... There is, now, a literary term for a book you can't stop reading.... It is The Red Car." —New York Times Book Review

In her "dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups" (People), celebrated novelist Marcy Dermansky offers a biting exploration of a woman's search for self-realization and models of a life well lived. When Leah's former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah her most prized possession—a flashy red sports car—the shock forces Leah to reevaluate her whole life. Leah is living in Queens with a husband she doesn't love and a list of unfulfilled ambitions. Returning to San Francisco to claim the mysteriously powerful car, she revisits past lives and loves in several sprawling days colored by sex and sorrow.

Dermansky evokes an edgy, capricious,...

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