You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories [Hardcover]

Liza Wieland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

In the nine stories of this, her second collection, the elusive nature of human feeling and experience continues to engage Liza Wieland's imagination, as her characters, old and young, male and female, try to define themselves against the unforgiving landscape of the American West and of their own desires.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fatherless grown children long to know the men who've abandoned them, while other adults become their parents' caretakers, in the complex scenes of guilt, responsibility, empathy and chance created by these nine complex and luminous stories. Haunted by a nightmare in which his dead father exhorts him to protect his capricious mother, Mason, the dutiful son of "Cirque du Soleil," frets that her shipboard romance with a young opportunist may lead to an ill-considered marriage. In the end it's Mason, dumped by his lady love, who envies his mother's happiness. Em Stanley of "Salt Lake" drives a UPS truck and cares for her dying mother, Mary Anne, who has told her daughter that Em's father left before she was born. When Em realizes that the man she knows as Uncle Ted is her father, she regrets Mary Anne's duplicity but chooses to empathize rather than castigate: "She listened for her mother's voice, telling her about the great, loveless world, and how she would move through it. How the world buoyed you up and that was a kind of affection, how chance was like love, out there waiting for your arrival, waiting for you to stop, take in the long view and say, this is the place." "Irradiation" charts the near relations of grief, forgiveness and revenge as Alice struggles with her anger at Christine, a teenage cancer patient whose carelessness caused the boat accident that killed Alice's husband. Though Wieland's prose apparently rambles, passages that look needlessly digressive yield, later in a story, deep views of characters' souls. Author of the well-received novel The Names of the Lost and the story collection Discovering America, Wieland remains a confident artist who prefers quiet resolutions. A lesser talent might have used the freak September snowstorm in "The Loop, the Snow, Their Daughters, the Rain" to create a tear-jerking disaster; instead, the narrative winds down gently as the protagonist heads safely for home. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Wielands second collection (Discovering America, 1993) comprises nine long, earnest, sometimes elegant stories that, unfortunately, keep the reader at a distance. In the novella-length title piece, a young man dying of AIDS meets the father who abandoned him as a baby. They bond to some extent, and the father teaches the son to drive. With all these stories the point of view, time, and voice shift frequently, and the digressions are plentiful, ranging from insightful to annoying. The most interesting tale is Purgatory, where a senile father tells some terrible truths about parenting to his willful, bitchy daughter, who is determined to become a parent. In Salt Lake, when a womans mother dies, she discovers that the man she thought was her uncle is really her father. Irradiation depicts a woman who stays in touch with the disturbed teenaged girl who caused her husbands death. Several stories are also very melancholy in tone, as evidenced by this passage from The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain: Each wondered, privately, why the whole world did not fall apart, did not drown in tears like this, sadness that could never be soothed, only diminished for a time by a cocktail, an in-flight movie, distance, time, speed, weather. The prose in the complicated and deeply sad Grays Anatomy has echoes of Conrad. Three elderly men meet in an emergency ward, each accompanied by a sick or injured child. When one of the children dies, her father ponders, We ought to have traded places, her damaged body for my good one. Hers that was not big enough to heal itself, for mine that was so large and empty on the inside, and like all bodies, so utterly dark and unknowable. Filled with extended passages of delicate and poetic language, but the pleasure quotient is low. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Southern Methodist University Press; 1st edition (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870744410
• ISBN-13: 978-0870744419
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,044,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting stories of human connection, September 19, 1999

By 

Diana Day - See all my reviews

This review is from: You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories (Hardcover)

This second short story collection is full of the same beautiful language that fills Liza Wieland's other prose. She carries us across state lines and into the minds of characters -- all of them filled with a haunting sadness that we come to feel ourselves. The stories are gorgeous in their telling and the voices, at times, begin to almost sing in your head. In the title story, as in others, we are witness to moments of beauty that seem monumental and bittersweet in the tragic lives of the characters. A wonderful book to make your way through, you will often find yourself stopping to reread a line or to soak in the full impact of an image.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It gets inside you as much and as far as you'll let it..., September 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories (Hardcover)

It moved me, caused me to think, and many times made me sad. There is a thread of melancholy running through Wieland's work, a kind of hovering sadness that tends to move in closer in some stories and sometimes hover farther off in the background in others, yet it is always there. This quality seems to me to be one of expressed intelligence. I think the more aware we are of the world around us, the more empathetic we are, even in our happiest moments, to the pain, injustice, and bitterness in life. And this, for me at least, often makes itself felt in a kind of melancholy or sadness that can never be quite defined, never quite confronted, but simply known.

I feel Wieland's work has always had a way of dealing with the day to day sublteties, the little battles won and lost, that is not only realistic, but intelligently observed and quietly expressed.

p.s. If the reviewer from Kirkus can't even figure out how to use quotes and apostrophes, how intelligent of a reader can s/he be?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wide open spaces, December 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: You Can Sleep While I Drive: Stories (Hardcover)

The stories of Wieland's second collection reveal a series of displaced characters longing for intimacy in the wide open spaces of the West. Often, what these characters find is that they are not alone, but joined by a series of presences, ghosts that weave themselves through the nine stories, haunting these characters with reminders of pasts they do not fully understand.

Irradiation, for example, begins with the death of the narrator's husband at the hands of Christine, a teenage cancer patient. When Christine recovers, an infatuation develops, forcing the narrator to befriend Christine, follow her to New York, and eventually lift her life from her, stealing a career and a boyfriend in the process. In Salt Lake, Em plays witness to the deterioration of her mother's health, and in the process learns of her mother's past, including the story of her own father. These revelations hint toward a legacy Em ultimately cannot bear to inherit.

Ghosts also haunt the narrator of Gray's Anatomy, the man who almost invented Nylon. He and two other men - one the inventor of Styrofoam and the other a Disney animator - meet in the hospital waiting room while on vacation on the California coast, in a story that creates a beautiful dance between their histories and the sometimes uncertain promise of a future for the ailing children these men cherish.

The wide open spaces are not always wide enough. In the stories Laramie and Purgatory, the narrators find themselves on long car trips with lovers they have grown distant from. As the narrator of Purgatory ruefully dreams of escape all the way to their destination, the family home, only to find the chaos that exists there somehow empowers her to dismiss her lover. After a blowout on the way to Yellowstone, the narrator of Laramie and her lover become further delayed by Al Laudermilk, his poet sister, and their senile father, who open their lives and offer a vision of how one gets trapped in Laramie, a vision that frightens the narrator out of love.

In the title story, an absent father named Mack travels across the country to the Bay Area at the request of his dying son. Their sprint of a relationship transforms both men, leading ultimately to a dream-like state of motion that Mack almost cannot control.

Wieland balances this longing and sorrow with a sense of hope - filtered through the lives of children. In Halloween, several neighbor women reveal private childhood secrets, which begin to sink in for a young girl as she learns to cope with the death of her father and the motherly responsibility she seems to feel for her younger brother. In the wonderfully lyrical The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain, two young families enjoy a trip to Chicago while their young daughters delight in discovering the power of language.

This power is at the center of Wieland's prose and her command of the craft of storytelling. In Laramie, her narrator recollects that:

". . . there were two kinds of poems, the kind that when you read them, they fill up a space inside you, an empty place that you didn't even know was there. And then there was the kind that when you read them, they made a space that you had to learn to live with, had to carry around until something, some experience filled it in."

These stories have done both.