Customer Reviews

Last Chance Texaco

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This is a story of pilgrimage, a tale of becoming, a great adventure. John Wade is running away from the darkness, demons, and despair that pursue him relentlessly. At the same time he is running towards something that he doesn't know or understand, yet he is compelled to keep on running towards it.

Pountney has given life to a rich and complex character. The pain of his alienation is palpable, and the wounds that he incurs as he attempts to reach out to others are searing to the reader as well.

The writing is spare, but takes on an edgy immediacy as the author confers on Wade prodigious powers of observation. An example is from what would otherwise be an unremarkable scene in a diner. "She peeled back the silver on a small plastic container of jam. Her knife blade caught the sun and flicked a bright spot on my chest. The sunlight made the jam look like the squishy inside of an open wound. It glistened and made a faint sucking sound."

Or in another instance, Wade is outside of Pittsburgh, watching a woman weed her garden. He describes this as follows: "She spent a whole hour on her knees pulling plants out of the ground and putting them into a black garbage bag. When it was full, she carried it over to the driveway and went into the house for another one. She stretched her back, looked up at the clouds brewing overhead, then crouched down again, clearing the ground under a spruce hedge".

In noting that the woman is pulling plants out of the ground (where else), that the garbage bag into which she is placing them is black, and that the subject hedge is indeed a spruce, Wade evidences his hunger for control, and for a measure of the ordinary in his life.

These are the observations of one skirting the perimeter of a dark and yawning abyss. The reader, who is along for the ride, cannot escape Wade's assessment of the stakes, "This country was harsh and unforgiving. There was no room for error or miscalculation".

In her first novel, Christine Pountney's coming of age tale about John Wade, a 15 year old boy uprooted from British Columbia to California, falls short in generating enthusiasm about his trials. Pountney seemed a little timid in fleshing out John Wade's personality. The basic mechanisms for the story are there, but the main character lacks an overall charisma. Granted, he is not supposed to be the most intelligent character but he rarely displays any spark to make him appealing.

It reads like a self-conscious journal of a young man afraid and perhaps incapable of fully expressing himself. All this aside, credit must be given to Pountney for giving Wade existence, as bland as his is. His thoughts also seem a little too P.C. and euphemistic for the time frame and his upbringing.

At times, Pountney is most definitely a thoughtful and observant writer, capturing idyllic images of the California coast and snapshots of a cross-country drive through the States. Her next project in the making entails the life of feisty Hanna, the provocative secondary character in "Last Chance Texaco" whose personality should have been fused into Wade's to give this book a chance.