Taking the Wall - Softcover

Agee, Jonis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890888 ISBN 13: 9781566890885

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1999

Synopsis

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

About this title

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

About the Author:

Jonis Agee is the acclaimed author of the novels South of Resurrection, Strange Angels, and Sweet Eyes. Her first story collection from Coffee House Press, Bend This Heart, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her new novel, The Weight of Dreams, is forthcoming from Viking in 1999. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches at the College of Saint Catherine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1566890888
• ISBN 13: 9781566890885
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184