Customer Reviews

Crashing America: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Holden Caulfield, move over. Crashing America is the novel that teenagers would read in school, if they were allowed to. By turns thrilling, moving, and poetic, but always exquisitely written with a relentless spirit.

Looking forward to Katia Noyes' next novel...or the movie of this one.

By MARK V. ROSE, author of BANGKOK, OH BOY! San Francisco, CA
Often funny but sometimes painful adventures of an adolescent lesbian who leaves disappointment in San Francisco (where her partner has just died of a drug overdose) to hit the road for America's heartland. In a raunchy seach for freedom, fulfillment and personal identity, the gritty tomboy heroine (called "Girl") hitchhikes, steals bikes and cars, money and change, works the fields, people and the police and bunks down with attractive and less attractive, oddball partners. Katia Noyes's CRASHING AMERICA is an honest and open tale of a very brazen, but sensitive, rootless young woman who tries to find and even plant some roots in America's farm belt, showing quite another side of the "farm girl" tradition. And, Noyes demonstrates a refreshing other geographical direction--the usual one is towards the western mecca of San Francisco where the disenfranchised try to find "roots"-- Noyes takes us away from it and into the small towns and fields of Utah, Iowa, the prairie and the cornfields of the midwest towards Randa, an older woman she had met earlier in the west and thought she was in love with. She has much more to learn.
I first heard Katia Noyes, a California author, read passages of the book at the San Francisco Public Library and enjoyed her unrelentless humor and directness. It's all there in the book along with a fascinating array of other authentic midwestern characters. And, it's not just for "tom boys." Highly recommended. An extra bonus is the way Noyes uses a unique and individuaized language to express "Girl's" monologue and dialogue. She creates new language rules and it is delightful!

CRASHING AMERICA violently throws the reader into the head and heart of a seventeen year old street girl infiltrating the American heartland in a poignant search for stability and love. Two pages of Noyes' masterpiece, and the reader has forgotten their own values and become totally immersed in the protagonist's scramble for money, for survival, and above all for a sense of place. It's a brilliant retake of the classic road trip to California story, with Girl, the hip-cynical protagonist, leaving San Francisco and heading into the Midwest, showing the reader farm life through outsider takes which are sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, and always insightful. The story is supercharged with a sense of movement, as Girl flees one crisis only to end up in another, constantly reaching out to a society that seems to never reach back.

This is a story which captivates both with the tale, and with the voice in which Noyes tells it. She's a master of language; every page makes the reader gasp in delight at a fresh and vivid expression. Reading her prose is like taking a purge to cleanse one's system of stodgy old similes and clichés. Ms. Noyes makes it look easy, but there's a master behind the scenes, measuring out heady doses of character and conflict in a broth of beautiful yet electrifying language that will make the reader wish this road trip will never end.

The heroine, one tough girl named "Girl," looks hard for love in this reversal of the Amercian pilgrimage story, going from the west back into the heartland. The prose is tough at first, as Girl is one tough young adult, very real. But the relentlessness of the prose in it's pacing, language, and clipped style, portrays perfectly the angular, alienated, alienating world of disenfrancished, love- and money-improverished youth. I really get under Girl's skin, feel what it's like to feel that lost.

What I love most about this heartbreaking story is that she keeps looking for love no matter what, everywhere, willing to take any offered thread, but then hopelessly tossing out what's offered in confusion and pain. This feels so like real life, rather than the romances of found love, that it makes my heart crack. I cry in the end, at the hopelessness of Girl's situation, at how long she has searched, and how long she will probably go on searching.

For me, this story is about the search for the love we never got from Mother, and the search for love and truth in the heartland. Just as our own alienated families have disappointed and betrayed us, so has the country. The American Dream is dead. The fields have gone fallow.

In the end, for me, this was not a hopeful story, but painfully true to life.

This is a great book. If you have ever wondered where you fit in, who you can connect with, or where you will end up, you will identify with Girl. The story is far more than your standard road-trip novel, its more like the screeching stops and weird routes your body will take when following where the soul leads. If you are put-off by a chick-lit category or a lesbian protagonist; get over it. Buy it. Read it. It might help you find your own "place of belonging".

Crashing America is about a street kid named Girl from San Francisco in search of her identity and family. Her mother committed suicide years before and her father seems to think of her as an embarrassing inconvenience.

Katia has done a great job of capturing Girl's character. Through her roadtrip, I kept thinking, "Yes, I've seen this person before," and then groaned as Girl pinged between bad decisions and the fate she drove herself towards.

This is an excellent first novel. I hope to see more of Katia's work in the future.

Everything about this debut novel is fresh, from the voice to the characters to the story. Couched in the expoits of a lesbian teenager taking to the road--don't let this scare you away, fellow straight readers!--is a remarkable exporation of what it means to love, and to want to be loved, delivered from the point of view of the devastatingly wise 17-year-old "Girl," with whom anyone with a heart can identify. ("All I wanted was a memory of somebody. When you had a mother you'd never really seen, it made you stuck on that. It made me recognize the way that life and history and families are filled with empty spaces. I saw them and felt them all the time.")

Wish there was a book like CRASHING AMERICA when I was a boy. It's the kind of book they should issue to teens as soon as they get into middle school. Twice I had read it, but it wasn't until a recent trip crisscrossing America, "trying to find a way inside," in the footsteps of Noyes' implacable heroine "Girl," not until I was tangled up with road maps did I really understand it. For sometimes you have to be really young, or else really in tune with your feelings, to "get" a perfect work of art.

As everyone else will tell you, CRASHING AMERICA is a powerful indictment of a society in which class injustice trumps every other factor in life, a system in which our children and our pets are our victims, brought into this world to amuse us and to provide a workforce, but otherwise to be ignored, molested and put down at will. At 17, Girl already seems to have a political understanding that defies common sense--surely no 17 year old ever had the writing ability that our narrator shows here--but such is the persuasiveness of Noyes' invention that I never bothered my head thinking about this until the long strange trip waS over and, like Girl, I was walking up Market Street towards the Castro on a sad Sunday afternoon from the bus depot on Seventh Street, looking at the workerbees who weren't there, for they had vacated the space to the bums and the wounded. Reading CRASHING AMERICA, I was reminded of similar scenes in Evelyn Lau's RUNAWAY and some parts of Tom Spanbauer's second and third novels, but here the brew is different, more focussed, more tragic, purer. Even the name "Girl," so reminiscent of a heroine from Erskine Caldwell's florid middle period, I got used to, as though it weren't so horribly symbolic.

After the tragic death of a girlfriend, Girl finds herself with literally nowhere to go. Her dad, "Mister White Socks," seems to despise her, and her mother committed suicide, her ghost clinging to the long reaches of Girl's memories. She heads midwest to get back to the farmland where the Clutter family got killed. That's the thing about Girl, you just want to shake her for every decision she makes is a bad one! And yet you sympathize with her at every turn and you know why she makes all these wrong turns. Oh! There's one part of the book that you will just throw the book down on the floor so horrifying is the lifechoice Girl decides to make. And yet then you will crawl back to the book just to find out what happens next. Katia Noyes, with whom I once took a writing workshop, has reader identification wired into every word she writes. And she can describe things so vividly it's like someone's waving them under your nose. A store detective wears a "surgically cut bob of red hair and a smug color of coral lipstick."

One caveat, and one spoiler--this book has a sequence in which a common housecat dies a tragic and painful death. It is not for the squeamish! The pages of my copy of CRASHING AMERICA are stained with tears all over that chapter. I've never read anything like it.

This story was too depressing for me. The main character, Girl, was not likeable and I struggled to finish the book.