Taking the Wall
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 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-collar 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. - Publisher’s Weekly

Stock-car races and demolition derbies are the settings for Agee’s newest collection of short stories, which explores the lives of peole who dream (usually futilely) of escaping their small-town, small-time lives in teh American heartland and heading for bigger cites, brighter lighs, and better cars. In "Good to Go," the narrator describes how her husband’s hopes for success on the oval tracks came to nothing when her mother ran off with a UPS driver, while in "Over the Point of Cohesion," a Winston Cup racer obsessively relives the race that ended his career, unable to believe that the accident was caused by a mistake he made. - Booklist

Your idea of a pit stop may not include a lube job or a tire change. Never mind. Jonis Agee’s absorbing new collection of short stores, Taking the Wall, is set in the world of auto racing, but it’s really about those times in life when we have to switch gears.

Much of the power in Agee’s short fiction lies in what’s left unsaid. In "The Trouble with the Truth," two women meet in a bar after finding out that they’re married to the same guy, a down-at-the-heels mechanic "who loves weddings." "Doris is my height, five-five, and medium build like me," the narrator says. "We could be cousins. . . . We’re serviceable types, Doris and me. We’re the women pushing kids into cars, shoving grocery carts down aisles, working behind counters. . . . Looking at the two of us, no wonder he made a mistake, forgot he already had a wife. Like buying a second bag of flour or a book you’ve already read."

As her world dissolves, she grasps for explanations: "When you get down to it we’re all pretty much alike, it seems, and that makes the hair-thin differences important. Maybe that’s what he notices, and while it looks like what he’s doing is buying the same shirt over and over, what he’s really doing is falling in love with these tiny differences."

Another disgruntled wife narrates "The Pop Off Valve." Her husband, Bobby, is such a maniacal racing fan that he talks about the Indy 500 while they’re making love. After 15 years of marriage, she’s had enough and is weighing her options: "Lately at work, Ron has been making little moves. You know the ones, the brush of an arm against the side of your breasts, the reaching of a hand to take the lint off your shoulder ,the extra smiles. . . . He’s not in automotive. That’s one thing you can say for him. He’s in housewares."

Like many of the characters in these stories, she’s about to make a fateful decision. And lie many of the stories, this one will end before the decision is made. Even so, we know enough, or think we do, to see what’s ahead.

The narrator of "You Know I Am Lying" is so obsessed with engines that he drops out of high school to work on the racing circuit, leaving his ailing parents to struggle alone on the family farm. After their deaths, he returns to auction off the homestead. "I haven’t been a bad son," he says, trying to rationalize years of neglect. "I came back some, when I could, in between races." Then, discovering empty shelves in the cellar where canned goods ought to be, he realizes that his mother stopped making her prizewinning pickles years before, but he’d been too self-absorbed to notice. "So here I am, the proud possessor of a Heinz pickle pin and the check from a farm we’d been able to keep in our family for three generations. Not much of a check at that, not anywhere near enough. You know I’d be lying if I said that it was." By writing just enough and nothing more, Agee forces us to imagine the rest: the neglectful son will soon be working on race cars again, but he’ll never forget those empty shelves. He’ll pay a price for his obsession. - The New York Times Book Review