The Red Car
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.
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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.
A dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups.
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
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.
[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
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
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.
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
