Customer Reviews

Through The Windshield

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Michael Decapite has managed something remarkable here, I think. With "Through the Windshield," he has given voice to a type (I use the term affectionately) that one rarely encounters in American fiction these days: a masculine romantic. But Danny, the dreaming, hesitant, bemused, open-eyed young cabbie whose story this is, is not an emblem. He's not a symbol. He's not a question mark or an exclamation mark or a fraction. He's that real literary rarity: the smart, gentle outsider; the observer; the friend you worry about and rely on; the self-contained man who, damaged by the world, leaks humanity and humor all over the place, and whose bitterness, when it arises, is intense, brief, and ultimately overwhelmed and sweetened by wonder. He's a man you'd like to know, a man you want to spend time with, have a drink with, drive through the night with. I really can't think of many characters in any fiction I've read recently whose voice, gait, clothes, hopes, doubts -- whose life was more familiar and believable to me than Danny's. This alone is no mean feat. The language Decapite employs is funny, smart, and seamless; the book has stunning passages of pure poetry. Here is a heartfelt portrait of a life, generously and painstakingly delineated, and I'm deeply grateful to the author for creating and sharing it.

DeCapite finds beauty, humor, & humanity while searching for a way to live in the blighted landscape of urban life; crazy and piercingly realized characters interspersed with surreal job experiences and meditations on the luminosity of physical surroundings; a great reminder of the grandeur possible in any human experience; an earthy, often blisteringly funny, song of a book.

What a book. Ed is the funniest character in fiction since Bardamu!... And the prose poems between the jokes are like paintings.

Through The Windshield is a great novel. Not a great first novel, which it is, but a great novel that truly depicts the modern world. From paycheck to paycheck, street to street; from despair to frustration to joy. The dialogue in 'Through The Windshield' is as crisp and real and basic as any you'll ever read. Mike Decapite is the Hemingway for the Millenium. The words aren't just coming from characters in a book, they're coming from your neighbors, friends, relatives, and yourself. If you've read excerpts of 'Through The Windshield before, now's the time to connect the dots. If you've yet to enjoy Mr. Decapite's writing, then welcome aboard.

I loved this book. Micheal DeCapite takes you into another world. Grimly realistic and mundane, the characters and industrial Cleveland landscape at times seem like one and the same. The often hilarious stories are mixed perfectly with the beautiful and poetic way DeCapite writes about his home town. Above all else it is these beautiful visual images brought to mind by his writing that will stay with me. There are pages in the book that I will go back to and enjoy over and over again.

Imagine Jim Jarmusch's film *Stranger Than Paradise* set entirely in Cleveland and stretched out to the length of the Godfather trilogy. Decapite writes about the people of Cleveland's decaying ethnic working-class westside, straight no chaser. Decapite's reality absorbs the reader. I wanted to walk into a bookie joint and place a bet, just to talk to the bookie and the bettors.

Imagine Jim Jarmusch's film *Stranger Than Paradise* set entirely in Cleveland and stretched out to the length of the Godfather trilogy. Decapite writes about the people of Cleveland's decaying ethnic working-class westside, straight no chaser. Decapite's reality absorbs the reader. I wanted to walk into a bookie joint and place a bet, just to talk to the bookie and the bettors.

You don't peruse or ponder Through the Windshield. You wield it. That's because it's not a book, see? It's the steering wheel of a beat-up Chevy Impala, which you happen to be driving along the potholed boulevards of Cleveland's West Side. Not only that, but DeCapite's in the back seat, reeling off funny stories. Nice work.

at first this book 'novel' made me sick, but after a while i found myself quite suicidal. thanks for the help. mr poot is #1