She Drove Without Stopping [Hardcover]

Jaimy Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1990

At 21, Jane is a frankly sexual creature, footloose and imprudent. She trades her dormitory room for a deserted house on the outskirts of town which she shares with Jimmy, a wandering Adonis. Her unorthodox lifestyle takes her across numerous obstacles, but her quest for independence culminates in Los Angeles where she saves herself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Avant-garde writer Gordon ( Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue ), here charts the madcap, trouble-prone, often raucous adventures of quixotic Jane Turner, aged 22 in the 1960s setting. The novel opens with Jane plotting to shoot Philip, her seductive, stingy, manipulative father, who represents a tyrannical male world of doctors, rapists, cops and tow-truck drivers who make Jane wonder whether she needs men at all. Deciding, nevertheless, to be sexually aggressive, she takes lovers--Willie Usher, a kindly black junk dealer, and then golden-haired Jimmy, with whom she lives in an abandoned farmhouse in Ohio after she escapes from the dorm at Harmonia College. Running away and eluding what she feels are unjust rules, Jane tears across the country in a "moneygreen Buick" and rejoins Jimmy in L.A. during the antiwar protests. Jane tends bar, and she and Jimmy drink and revel with the neighborhood oddballs--until the ominous appearance of spooky Raymozo the Rayman. Writing with witty ebullience, Gordon unleashes a tale that is nontraditional and open-ended.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jane, the protagonist of this extraordinary coming-of-age novel, lurches and stumbles through childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood in a kind of freefall nightmare which brings into question the very basis of the American way of life. All sense of family, love, and emotional relationship is twisted into harsh, often brutal forms as Jane moves from being fondled by her father as a young child to being rejected by him when she becomes a gawky pre-adolescent. The difficulties she has with her father seem to catapult her through a crazed early adult life full of odd characters, seedy back streets, and frightening incidents until, in the end, she comes to a personal resolve. The writing is vivid, intensely poetic, and just sassy enough to make palatable the harshness of the reality being described.
- Jessica Grim, Univ. of California Lib., Berkeley
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 390 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; 1st edition (May 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0945575246
• ISBN-13: 978-0945575245
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,767,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A non-stop, lyrical work of well crafted prose., February 4, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: She Drove without Stopping: A Novel (Paperback)

Twenty-year-old Jane Turner sets off on a cross-country adventure in She Drove Without Stopping. By the end of her reckless, risky year on the road she's been in love, in danger, in jail, and, finally, in control of her own life again. In She Drove Without Stopping, author Jaimy Gordon provides a memorable protagonist in a whirling, non-stop, lyrical novel where a well-crafted prose is in perfect service to a deeply engaging, unique, and entertaining story. Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Coming of Age Story, January 4, 2011

By 

G. Messersmith "calliopemuse" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: She Drove without Stopping: A Novel (Paperback)

Jane Turner takes us through her life growing up from the time she was "the happiest of babies" until she is in her early 20s driving across the country with little money in an old beater car. Jane is the middle child, between two sisters, from an upper middle class family, her father is an attorney. Her father is her whole problem. He dotes on her when she is young and then completely ignores her when she reaches puberty. She dreams of killing him but knows it still won't make him love her. She grows up in Pennsylvania in the 1960s and goes off to college in Ohio. Once at college instead of living in the dorms she finds an old abandoned house which she moves into with a gorgeous blond boy named Jimmy. But Jane is not completely faithful to Jimmy she hooks up with a black junk dealer who she has an ongoing friendship with. She does eventually graduate college and goes home for a very short period of time, by now her parents are divorcing and she is hardly speaking to her father. This is when she decides to trek across the country in search of her freedom and herself.

In fact she gets even with her father in that she lives a life that is nightmarish to him. She is constantly moving and between jobs and she moves down the social ladder of society where she finds father substitutes and friendship. It is truly the story of a girl becoming a woman having to do things her way or not at all.

5.0 out of 5 stars Feminist picaresque with a memorable protagonist, October 7, 2011

By 

Timothy J. Bazzett "ReedCityBoy" (Reed City, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: She Drove Without Stopping (Hardcover)

Sheesh! Where to begin? How do you boil down, summarize, explain or critique a story as big and complex as SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING? It's a novel that is so unique it seems to defy easy comparisons. Jaimy Gordon has created, in Jane Turner, a character to be admired and pitied simultaneously. Because she is without question a victim, but she adamantly refuses to be a victim. Does that make sense? Probably not, but there it is. I'll try to explain this, but probably won't succeed.

SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is essentially Jane's life story, or at least the first 21 years of it. She is the middle child (there are two sisters who remain minor characters) of a successful corporate lawyer who dotes on her for the first eight years of her life. Indeed there appears to be a pattern of inappropriate squeezing, groping and fondling on the part of the father, Philip Turner. And if there is one particular villain in the story it is the philandering father, referred to by even Jane as simply "Philip Turner." Jane's mother is something of a basket case who makes regular visits to her analyst, Dr. Zwilling, while attending to her daughters in a more or less robotic fashion.

Confused by all the fatherly groping, Jane is nevertheless devastated when her father ceases to lavish attention on her and even begins to act as though he hates her and finds her repulsive. Jane's puberty and junior high and high school years are a tortuous horror for her. (But hey, isn't it for all of us, come to think of it?) But packed off to the unusually liberal "Harmonia College" in rural Ohio, Jane finally busts loose, buying a car and moving off campus and making friends with a rather grotesque group of locals, including Willie D. Usher, the Soul of Commerce; Felix the bartender at the Downtown Rec Club; Fred Blood the grocery clerk; Officer Rollo the local constable; unemployed actor Roger O. Booth (aka Albert Huzzy), who is the friend (camp follower) of California golden boy artist Jimmy Fluharty. Jane is smitten almost immediately with Jimmy and they move into an abandoned farmhouse together and spend a lot of time making the beast with two backs as well as other sexual shapes. Jimmy seems to be a person who loves himself more than anyone else, but Jane doesn't care - there's unquestionably a lot more lust than love in the relationship.

But RAPE intervenes, and, finding justice not forthcoming, Jane flees, first back home to Baltimore where her parents are in the middle of a bitter divorce. So she hits the road in her "moneygreen Buick" for further misadventures. The secondary and primary roads west seem a lot like Huck Finn's Mississippi - filled with more characters, more "adventures." And when she hits Los Angeles and joins up with Jimmy again, another whole cast of grotesques assemble - Cochise and Mama, Billy and Marie, Raymozo the Rayman, and even Dr. Zwilling turns up again, transplanted to the west coast as a new-age therapist.

Like I said at the beginning, this is a really BIG book, bigger even than its 390 pages might suggest. There is a whole life in here, Jane Turner's life, and how she interacts with an enormous cast of well-defined characters. Jane is highly sexed, confused and, most of all, ANGRY, although she's not quite sure why. Because, as she states more than once, she began life as an extremely happy baby. Her subsequent family life, however, is a horror, and things continue to get worse as poor Jane is alienated, humiliated, raped and scorned. (A sequence of events that left me feeling faintly guilty just for being male.) And yet, fear not, because at the very end there is the hint of a kind of redemption and freedom. And hey, if we're lucky, maybe even a sequel. The book is twenty years old now, and I can't help wondering how Jane's life turned out. So yeah, maybe a sequel would be in order. It's a BIG book, a LONG book, but by God - and pardon my cliche - it is "gripping human drama." Jaimy Gordon knows how to tell a story. And SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is a darn good one.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER