ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CRUFT|Car and DriverFrom the September/October issue of Car and Driver.It was a mediocre book, the kind you pick up at the airport and forget by the time you get to baggage claim. I couldn’t tell you the plot, but I can tell you which cars were in it. I remember because they were unusual models: an Oldsmobile 442, a Dodge Shelby Charger, and a ’73 Plymouth Road Runner.
I tried to ask the author what prompted his choices, but he must have been busy working on the sequel, because he never responded. Maggie Stiefvater, another author whose novels tend to involve a car or two, was more enthusiastic to chat. Her most recent book, The Listeners, charmed me by having not only several dachshunds but also a Pierce-Arrow limo. Her best-known works, a series called the Raven Cycle, feature several memorable cars, including a second-generation Camaro that regularly leaves teenage protagonist Gansey stranded.
“I had a 1973 Camaro at the time,” Stiefvater tells me. “Every time it broke down, I would make Gansey break down in the book.” She eventually had to stop giving her character car problems. “They were never getting anywhere,” she explains. But Gansey’s unreliable Chevrolet isn’t just an affectionate tribute to Stiefvater’s. “It’s an amplifier,” she says. “It says something about the character that he drives this kind of car, that he wants to build something from the ground up.”
A car can add so much character to a character. So why are motor vehicles less front and center in fiction than in cinema? “Movie car” is a common term; “lit car,” not so much. I suppose it makes sense that we won’t find automobiles in a fantasy in which all transportation is by dragon or a period piece in which people are ruining their chances at marriage in horse-drawn carriages. And now that I think about it, the vast majority of written storytelling occurred inconveniently before the invention of the car. One can’t be mad that Homer never mentioned what Odysseus drives, though there are a lot of boat details. The Trojan horse had wheels. Could that be considered the first instance of a Mustang hitting bystanders?Okay, but seriously, cars did make it into a book before any made it onto the road. Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century imagines a paved city overrun by gasoline-powered cabs belching fumes. Verne wrote this science-fiction novel in 1863, more than two decades before the first acknowledged automobile. Once cars became mainstream, such transportation got a more regular supporting role. By the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway was calling out makes and models in his novels, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was expecting readers to know that a Rolls-Royce signifies one kind of person and a Dodge another.In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, published in 1930, a motorsports race gets a detailed chapter, with references to drivers and events from the 1929 Belfast TT that readers of the day would have recognized from the sports pages. Today’s audience might not know that the “Plunket-Bowse” that Agatha crashes is a made-up brand poking fun at some of the era’s racers, but they’ll still understand that the whole scene represents a recklessness in the main characters. Literary fender leaning doesn’t always work. In Adrian McKinty’s The Island (2022), a major plot point hinges on such a misconstrued understanding of a car’s advanced driver-assistance systems that I couldn’t finish the book. Madge Maril’s new Formula 1–themed romance, Slipstream, doesn’t contain any notable car fallacies, but that’s because F1 details are scant—as is romance, for that matter. The Listeners: A NovelNow 50% Off$30 $15 at Amazon$23 $15 at WalmartI asked friends to share their favorite novels that feature cars and ended up reading enough pages to earn me a Book It! party at Pizza Hut. Among the authors were some expected names, such as Ian Fleming, with his seductive Aston Martins (this is a test, because we know they were Bentleys in the books, but there is one volume where Bond finally gets in an Aston), and Stephen King, whose murderous Plymouth was in print way before making it onto film. There was also Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South (1979)—the main character’s wife runs off with his Ford Torino, and he just wants the car back, with hilarious and tragic results. Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee mysteries, where clues are found in four-wheel-drive tracks and bruised oil pans on low-slung passenger cars, kept me busy for a month. I’m only partway through my list of recommendations, but I encourage fellow readers to start car spotting at your local library. Maybe we can start a book club.More from Elana Scherr
- Elana Scherr: M5 Appreciation
- Elana Scherr: The Supercar Sorority
- Elana Scherr: Defining GOAT
Source: caranddriver.com
