Let the Dog Drive [Unknown Binding]

David Bowman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1993

It's 1975. Bud Salem, 18-years-old, is fleeing his mother's TV church and meets a woman pitching oranges in the Mojave. She's Sylvia Cushman, a 45-year-old housewife, who loves driving alone through the desert. They odyssey through western motels and Apache gas stations where Sylvia gives long lectures about Emily Dickinson and drags Bud up into the mesas to search for petroglyphs. After sharing adventures in Detroit, New York, and Amherst, the travelers part...

In many ways Let the Dog Drive is an askew detective novel— when a character dies under strange circumstances in Texas, Bud goes to the panhandle to uncover what happened. His strange narration does contain pleasures of the genre: a shootout inside an aquarium; a faked death; another shootout on a chicken farm in Texas...But Let the Dog Drive is also a freewheeling merging of many other genres and concerns-- Hollywood, hardboiled novels of the 1930s, Emily Dickinson's white dress, hallucinatory cacti, The Book of Luke...And dogs.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of New York University's Bobst Emerging Writers Award, this tedious first novel blends various genres: surreal satire, detective fiction, road trip and Barthelme-like fantasy, spiked with movie lore and literary allusions. The result is a hollow if technically proficient postmodernist exercise. Bud Salem, the 18-year-old narrator, flees California and his mother, a flaky televangelist. Hitchhiking in the Mojave Desert in 1975, he teams up with Sylvia Cushman, a "literate housewife" who perceives secret geometric patterns in Emily Dickinson's verse. Bud makes a pilgrimage to Dickinson's house in Amherst, Mass., and then goes on to Detroit, where he meets Sylvia's husband, Joshua, an auto engineer who tests cars for safety by having dogs drive the vehicles in bloody, fatal accidents. A wealthy Iranian debutante hiding from death squads, photographs of dogs' souls taken by Bud's father (an ex-stuntman in Tarzan films) and a shootout with a lunatic cowboy in Brooklyn's Coney Island aquarium are elements of a plot that careens from New York to New Orleans to Texas. Fans of old movies and hardboiled whodunits of the '30s may enjoy the recurring references.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"You'd think nothing would live up to this title, but the book, being more generous as well as witty, more than tops it...incandescent."

-The New Yorker,

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Product Details

• Unknown Binding: 295 pages
• Publisher: NewYork University Press (May 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814712053
• ISBN-13: 978-0814712054
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,071,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars literate and foolish, January 17, 2001

By 

L Metz (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let the Dog Drive (Mass Market Paperback)

This book was one of my first adolescent literary loves. It was among the first that began my lensding library of contemporary fiction. As such, I have purchased it about five times. Each time that it comes back, I read it again. It is fresh and touching each time as it was the first. In Sylvia, I found a literary woman who was worth idolizing. She is by no means perfect, but it is by that token that one cannot help but love her. Not love her a little; rather, she challenges you to not fall madly and passionately in love with her. When you do, she won't give you another thought. She was a woman both self-absorbed and extroverted. Needless to say that I fell in love with her. She is a woman ruled by the men in her life, but fixed by a female literary force, both powerful and meek. In contrast, Orange Boy is ruled by women, powerful ones who are destructive when brought together. The conflicts of male and female energy, of intellectual and sexual concerns and of family versus personal responsibilities are presented in "Drive" like nowhere else that I have yet to find. This book is as brilliant as it was the first time that I read it. Thank you to Bowman for his intimacy with beauty.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A sort of funny disappointment, July 23, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Let the Dog Drive (Mass Market Paperback)

David Bowman's "Let the Dog Drive," while frequently funny, seems to suffer from a case of wackiness for wackiness' sake, a sort of look-how-crazy-I-am voice that leads us through various scenes of senseless violence and college bull session-like ruminations on such highbrow fare as Emily Dickinson. Which is a shame, since there's a lot of good material here, hiding just behind the screen of self-conscious hilarity. The scene that lends the book its title hints at potential the rest of the story never quite lives up to, leaving us to grow tired of the orange motif, the limp terrorism subplot, and various instances where characters are shot or beat up without managing to elicit any sympathy from the reader. When a suposedly focal character dies and you find yourself not particularly caring and in fact being *annoyed* that the other characters are obsessed with her, you know this story is in trouble.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars prop this one on your steering wheel and go, November 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Let the Dog Drive (Mass Market Paperback)

Anyone who has propped a book on the steering wheel for a little reading at 65 mph can appreciate this book. Anyone who hasn't shouldn't write book reviews. Anyone incensed with the "crash dummies" or concerned with experimentation using animals can appreciate the dark satire of this book. Anyone who had juvenile fantasies about a redhead can appreciate the strange love story within this book. Anyone who has hitchhiked can relate to this book.

For me, all of the above. I loved this book.