The Red Car
With each new novel, Marcy Dermansky deploys her "brainy, emotionally sophisticated" (New York Times) prose to greater and greater heights, and The Red Car is no exception.
Leah is living in Queens with a possessive husband she doesn't love and a long list of unfulfilled ambitions, when she's jolted from a thick ennui by a call from the past. Her beloved former boss and friend, Judy, has died in a car accident and left Leah her most prized possession and, as it turns out, the instrument of Judy's death: a red sports car.
Judy was the mentor Leah never expected. She encouraged Leah's dreams, analyzed her love life, and eased her into adulthood over long lunches away from the office. Facing the jarring disconnect between the life she expected and the one she is now actually living, Leah takes off for San Francisco to claim Judy's car. In sprawling days defined by sex, sorrow, and unexpected delight, Leah revisits past lives and loves in search of a self she abandoned long ago. Piercing through Leah's surreal haze is the enigmatic voice of Judy, as sharp as ever, providing wry commentary on Leah's every move.
Following her "irresistible" (Time) and "wicked" (Slate) novel Bad Marie, Dermansky evokes yet another 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.
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.
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.--Marion Winik
A dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups.
A swift and magical read . . . . Spare, funny and deftly observant of what happens when our repressed emotions reach a violent precipice.--Maddie Crum
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.
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.--Amy Brady
[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.--Andrea Kempf
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.--Natalie Bakopoulos
