Taking the Wall [Paperback]

Jonis Agee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

As the engines roar and the green flag waves, these stories tear across their rural landscape with the energy of a Winston Cup race. Like W.P. Kinsella's minor league ballplayers, Jonis Agee's drivers, pit crews, mechanics, and their families live in small towns, eat at truck stops, and have a hard time keeping their dreams from destroying their lives. From the garage to the kitchen table, from demolition derby to nascar, Agee's hapless heroes open our eyes as they take the wall.
The wildly popular sport of auto racing is a backdrop in these stories for exploration of the creative and destructive aspects of obsession. In farmhouses, mobile homes, and roadside trailer courts, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters all try to figure out how to keep their families running as smoothly as their cars. Taking the Wall is rich with details about racing and rural life, and richer yet in insight into that part of the human spirit that just doesn't know how to quit. Agee takes a personal and compassionate look at a grab bag of individuals linked by obsession.
Reviews
Novelist (South of Resurrection) and short fiction (Bend This Heart) writer Agee's collection of bittersweet stories dissects the rough world of auto racing from the working-class perspectives of drivers, pit crews, fans, family and other hangers-on. While "taking the wall", crashing into it, is the worst possible scenario, Agee's characters secretly wish for the excitement, horror and suspense it offers: will the driver walk away from the fiery wreck? Domestic life unfolds around the racetrack throughout the collection. "The Pop Off Valve" is a monologue in which an unnamed narrator recounts her naovet in marrying a man obsessed with racing, and the wake-up call she received on her honeymoon 15 years ago at the Motor Speedway in Irish Hills, Mich., when not even a terrible accident could thwart her husband's devotion to his hobby. Her description of the crash is chilling: "the rescue workers used the jaws of life to pry what was left of the driver from the shattered burnt shell of the car." Nonchalantly, she adds, "We grilled steaks on the hibachi at dark, unable to see the bloody raw meat until we cut into it." Agee's parsimonious language is sta

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"You pay for your mistakes in racing," one of Jonis Agee's characters tells us. "You miss the set-up and take the wall." As one might expect, her short story collection Taking the Wall is full of men and women paying for their mistakes--not to mention their dreams, obsessions, and even ordinary bad luck. In this case, all four frequently boil down to the same thing: cars. The narrator of "You Know I Am Lying" sells the family farm to keep racing; the NASCAR devotee in "The Pop-Off Valve" ignores his marriage while his wife contemplates an affair; and the crippled ex-driver of "Over the Point of Cohesion" can't stop recalculating the mechanics of his final crash. Even their families aren't exempt from the madness. Managing a salvage business while her husband races, the narrator of "Good to Go" looks out over 20 acres of junked cars and has her own, peculiarly automotive Proustian moment: "It only took ten days to get us married. I was sixteen. Donnie was nineteen. But that isn't the car I'm talking about."

These stories inevitably start with a rush ("I'm sorry, I always go with men with bad teeth, I want to tell my daughter, who is sobbing long distance at one thirty in the morning") and end just when you think they've left the gate ("He hoped that somehow, when he finally crawled into bed tonight, he could think of a way to convince Marie that he was as much Elvis as she might want or need on Christmas Day"). In between, the prose careens forward at a truly vertiginous speed, as Agee's characters learn that sometimes domestic life is the most spectacular car crash of all. You don't have to be a NASCAR fan to appreciate these powerful, fast-moving tales--just a student of human nature and its boundless ability to endure. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist (South of Resurrection) and short fiction (Bend This Heart) writer Agee's collection of bittersweet stories dissects the rough world of auto racing from the working-class perspectives of drivers, pit crews, fans, family and other hangers-on. While "taking the wall"Acrashing into itAis the worst possible scenario, Agee's characters secretly wish for the excitement, horror and suspense it offers: will the driver walk away from the fiery wreck? Domestic life unfolds around the racetrack throughout the collection. "The Pop Off Valve" is a monologue in which an unnamed narrator recounts her na?vet? in marrying a man obsessed with racing, and the wake-up call she received on her honeymoon 15 years ago at the Motor Speedway in Irish Hills, Mich., when not even a terrible accident could thwart her husband's devotion to his hobby. Her description of the crash is chilling: "the rescue workers used the jaws of life to pry what was left of the driver from the shattered burnt shell of the car." Nonchalantly, she adds, "We grilled steaks on the hibachi at dark, unable to see the bloody raw meat until we cut into it." Agee's parsimonious language is stamped with a stark, forceful clarity. This is a stellar collection about blue-color folk, their plucky and despairing relationships and their dreams of speed and glamour. The final two stories ("Caution" and "Mystery of Numbers") close the book on a slightly different tone, featuring untethered voices not as direct or tautly styled as the previous pieces. If this book were a movie, it would be a noisy midwestern starring Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson and Sissy Spacek, with Martha Plimpton as the feisty young grease monkey working at the Glory to God garage, across from the Curl Up & Dye Hair Salon. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566890888
• ISBN-13: 978-1566890885
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,956,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of my stories and novels are set. In all, I'm the author of thirteen books, including five novels, five collections of short fiction, and two books of poetry.

My most recent novel is The River Wife (Random House, 2007), which is about five generations of women who experience love, heartbreak, passion, and deceit against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century South. I'm the Adele Hall Professor of English at The University of Nebraska -- Lincoln, where I teach creative writing and twentieth-century fiction.

I'm married to the writer Brent Spencer. Together we are the indentured servants to two bichons frises and one horse. We live in Ponca Hills, which is on the Missouri River, north of Omaha.

I own twenty pairs of cowboy boots (some of them works of art), love the open road, and believe that ecstasy and hard work are the basic ingredients of life and writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Taking the Wall, October 30, 2008

By 

Virginia E. Brookins "Ginny" (West Coast) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Taking the Wall (Paperback)

This book was a big disappointment after reading her "River Wife" - not even in the same ball park.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the Race Track Wall, December 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Taking the Wall (Paperback)

This book takes the wall, and keeps going. Flashes of grace illuminate these stories of workaday people who dream of something more. Agee's blue-collar characters come out of the curve in terribly mixed up and out-of-control circumstances, and nearly always manage to grab the wheel and steer the course. If only we all had their sense of direction. Take this book for a spin--it handles well.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the Wall--Grabbing the Dream, March 20, 2002

By 

Ramona Honan "reviews-by-melva" (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Taking the Wall (Paperback)

Taking the Wall is a selection of short stories about the dreams and aspirations of all the would-be Nascar racers across the southern states of America. Jonis Agee has captured the thrill of winning, but more often the frustration of not being to make it to the big one whether it be car failure, money, or skill. But to these backyard racers, there is always the next one. Maybe the car won't take the wall this time and the frustrated racer will finally win.

Racing is an obsession to them and because of it families will crumble and divorces will ensue. But this does not deter the racer. He will follow his dream to the end.

Three paragraphs really jumped out at me while reading this book of short stories. One in "The First Obligation":

"I mean a whole life can't come down to this collection of furniture and photographs, like a bunch of trophies you win in go-cart for just showing up--what kind of a race is that? I mean the sun's going down, my car engine's blown, and I can't even remember enough of my life to cry good tears over it. I feel like I'm rolling loose, about to hit the wall again, and no one's looking anymore."

And later

"A dream is something you die for," she'd told him, and he'd looked at her, lying drained of blood as if her own dream and not his father's was the thing he should fear. He'd understood then that she loved her husband, that his father hadn't forced her to what was her death bed, she had climbed into it herself. They were lucky, these two people, his parents, he'd come to realize over the next few years. Lucky because they';d been true to their dreams and because they knew what those dreams were. Recognized them out of all the others that must have presented themselves like dancers at the dance."

and finally in the short story, "Mystery Numbers":

"Late summer when Dale Earnhardt had driven into the wall at the start of the Mountain Dew Southern 500, they said he experienced 'a transient alteration of his consciousness.' Tom was thinking he needed one of those, but hoped it wouldn't take a smack in the wall to do it."

These men (and women) always hope that they will be one day up there with the Earnhardts, the LaBontes, the Martins. That is not the main reason, though. It is the car. It is the love of the car and the need for speed. And they keep trying.