The Red Car: A Novel

by Marcy Dermansky

Overview

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Library Journal

“Sharp and fiery.... There is, now, a literary term for a book you can’t stop reading.... It is The Red Car.” —New York Times Book Review

In her “dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups” (People), celebrated novelist Marcy Dermansky offers a biting exploration of a woman’s search for self-realization and models of a life well lived. When Leah’s former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah her most prized possession—a flashy red sports car—the shock forces Leah to reevaluate her whole life. Leah is living in Queens with a husband she doesn’t love and a list of unfulfilled ambitions. Returning to San Francisco to claim the mysteriously powerful car, she revisits past lives and loves in several sprawling days colored by sex and sorrow.

Dermansky evokes an edgy, capricious, and beautifully haunting heroine—one whose search for realization is as wonderfully unpredictable and hypnotic as the twists and turns of the Pacific Coast Highway. Tautly wound, transgressive, and mordantly funny, The Red Car is an incisive exploration of one woman’s unusual route to self-discovery.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631492341
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	809 KB

About the Author

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the novels The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey with her daughter.

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Marcy Dermansky

A Conversation with Michele Filgate

"They would not tell me what to do, my beloved sea lions, because they did not care about me, they did not love me, and that was also fine. They were sea lions."

Children can spend hours in imaginary worlds of their own making — worlds in which creatures like sea lions take on as much significance as other people. Some of us lose that sense of wonder and freedom, while others cultivate it. That would seem to be the case for Marcy Dermansky, whose The Red Car is a semi-autobiographical novel about Leah, a thirty- three-year-old woman who is trapped in a suffocating marriage until her former boss, Judy, is killed in a "car accident" that might have been intentional. Judy, it turns out, bequeathed the red sports car she died in to her former employee and friend. This is the catalyst Leah needs to change her life; she leaves her Queens apartment behind (and her angry husband, who chokes her when she tells him she's leaving) and travels to San Francisco to get the car.

"Everything I did in this book is really to entertain myself," Dermansky said recently over lunch at a bustling French bistro on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Animal life included: "I put sea lions in [The Red Car] and there were sea lions in Bad Marie. And I felt like that's against the rules, like you're not allowed to put sea lions in two books in a row."

Imaginative play, though, serves serious emotional and artistic ends for Dermansky, who wrote The Red Car after her own marriage ended. She didn't travel back to San Francisco, where she lived after college, but she did have a Judy-like boss she was close to who passed away fifteen years ago. "Sometimes you don't know how to process things, and so you end up writing about the things you're thinking about," Dermansky says. "And so the things I was thinking about in my life came out in Leah's story. She got to make mistakes and go on an adventure . . . I sent her somewhere I wanted to go."

The Red Car began as a writing exercise: Dermansky wanted to write a novel in the vein of one of her favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. To prepare, she reread a bunch of his books and copied his structure: a prologue, followed by jumping ahead six years and then a decade. There are references to the author in The Red Car, including naming a character Yumiko (the name of Murakami's niece). And like the famous author, she bases the fictional character on herself: "I really think every Murakami narrator in his own way is really Haruki Murakami," she says. "They write and exercise and they like all the things he likes."

Dermansky also included some of the magic realism Murakami is known for; the car Leah inherits, for instance, miraculously fixes itself (regenerate is the word she uses — I can't help but think of Doctor Who) after the accident. When other people try to drive it, the car goes dangerously fast, as if it has a will of its own — or perhaps it's haunted by Judy, whose voice still lives in Leah's head.

"I'm always hearing people talk to me," Dermansky says. "I do something, and I'm like, What would my sister think?" It took two years after she got divorced to stop hearing her ex- husband criticize her. "That's not his fault; that's my fault," she says.

It took less than a year to write The Red Car, and Dermansky didn't delete anything. "That's not normally my experience," Dermansky says. The result is a slim, seductive book about a complicated character who is stuck in a monotonous, unhappy life until suddenly, she's given the keys to a new one. It's Leah's self-doubt and deadpan observations that fuel the engine of the novel.

"I'm always really interested in what a character is thinking, like everything they do," Dermansky says. "If you don't talk about their thinking, then what's the point of what they're doing?" As a result Leah's thoughts and voice are the center of The Red Car, tinged with compelling humor and melancholy as she tries to figure out what her life is all about. The result is a story that doesn't dodge mistakes but proposes to be as much about opportunities as it is about guilt: "I did a lot of not so good things, but somehow I did not doubt my goodness," the narrator thinks at one point.

Instead of going on her own adventurous road trip, Dermansky recently moved to Montclair, New Jersey with her seven-year- old daughter, Nina. She pays her bills by providing editing services for other writers. When she's not writing or editing, she enjoys drawing because "it's easier than writing. You make a drawing and then it's done." Earlier this year, Dermansky gave me a compelling drawing she made of a bright red car. It's quirky and original, just like she is.

Nina attended one of her mother's readings not long ago, and she insisted they make lemonade to bring to the event. ("But an hour before the reading here I am, cutting up lemons and sugar and it's sticky and always makes a mess. I'm having to carry it down the street and we spill it. I'm like, This is the worst idea I've ever had.") Dermansky read from the most innocuous scene she could find: "I read this part where [Leah] goes to see her friend and she just shows up and there's a box of kitten t-shirts, so I thought Nina would like the kitten T- shirts. And what I didn't realize is, Oh, they're kitten T-shirts but they're all taking drugs." Nina wasn't listening to the reading, as it turns out, but at the end of the evening she astutely calculated how many books her mother had sold and decided she made enough money to buy her a book. "I bought her Bad Kitty. She's really into Bad Kitty books right now."

—January 13, 2017

Editorial Reviews

There should be a literary term for a book you can't stop reading that also makes you stop to think. I slammed down The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky's sharp and fiery new novel, in tense fits and jumpy starts, putting down the book to ponder it, but not pondering long because I had to know what happened next. The novel's furious action keeps the pages snapping by, but each incident, at times each sentence, is bubbling with equally furious ideas. "A novel of ideas" is not the term for this—that's a term for a book that often has big chunks of boring, which The Red Car does not—but neither does it inhabit the term "entertainment," which assumes a certain shallowness also nowhere to be found…The book speeds along, veering off to locales and characters we never thought we'd see again. It is like life in this way, the feeling that if we could just stop for a minute and figure all this out, we'd know where we are going, but we can't stop because we're too busy getting there.

The New York Times Book Review - Daniel Handler

"If you want to fall in love with a book almost at first sight (i.e. paragraph four) . . . read Marcy Dermansky’s The Red Car."

Elle

"A dry, delightful fairy tale for grown-ups."

People

"A swift and magical read . . . . Spare, funny and deftly observant of what happens when our repressed emotions reach a violent precipice."

Huffington Post - Maddie Crum

"I've been waiting and waiting for a new book from Marcy Dermansky and finally that new book is here. The Red Car is taut and smart and strange and sweet and perfect. I want to eat this book or sew it to my skin or something."

Roxane Gay

"Pitch-perfect novel…Sprinkled with dark humor and many literary references, Dermansky’s novel is ultimately one of compassion, optimism, and fierce feminism, in which an unmoored young woman enmeshed in bad relationships with men resets her life path."

|Los Angeles Times

"The Red Car is melancholy and introspective, but sharply witty and transgressive too, and it’s full of the intrepid gestures I so love in fiction, both by the characters and the writing itself. There’s a particular intellectual and emotional gratification to be found in this smart novel that so wonderfully blurs boundaries of reality, of past and present, of time and space. The Red Car is a remarkable book."

San Francisco Chronicle - Natalie Bakopoulos

"Dry, entertaining and crookedly insightful. . . . [The Red Car] is on one level, a fairy tale complete with fairy godmother, and on another, a whispered goad to the reader: Live the life you really want."

Newsday - Marion Winik

"A new book by the inimitable Marcy Dermansky is worth cheering for. The Red Car is droll, unflinching, and mysterious, a feat of efficient storytelling. I could not put it down. This novel mesmerized me."

Edan Lepucki

"Don’t be fooled by The Red Car’s brevity: it packs a serious punch. Dermansky’s vision is sharp and clear, pushing her beautifully realized protagonist, Leah, into the rapids on a journey of self-discovery. And we’re right there at her side, breathless, as she shakes herself awake. A tremendously moving story that feels true and important."

Cari Luna

"There are few writers who can do what Marcy Dermansky does so effortlessly in The Red Car, the way she pushes this story in such surprising and thrilling directions, never losing control, taking your breath away line by beautiful line. Dermansky writes with such unnerving clarity about grief, not just for the loss of a loved one, but for our own unexpected lives. A strange, unflinching, utterly amazing novel."

Kevin Wilson

"Dermansky’s writing is taut and smart. And it’s a thrill to cheer on Leah, that admirable badass, wherever the red car takes her next."

Chicago Review of Books - Amy Brady

"I’ve long admired the work of Marcy Dermansky, and her latest is an absolute stunner. The Red Car is the very rare kind of novel that—with its urgency and intrigue and deep intelligence—will pin you to your chair and transport you utterly. Stop what you’re doing and read this book."

Laura van den Berg

"With the release of her incandescent third novel The Red Car, she’s poised to ride the current wave of fascination with these anti-heroines."

Buzzfeed - Doree Shafrir

"Marcy Dermansky’s The Red Car is a wonder. Moving, mysterious and filled with dark, sly humor, it rustles under your skin and stays there. By the time I reached its shimmering final pages, I wanted to go right back to the beginning and start again."

Megan Abbott

★ 2016-07-19
Shocked by the death of her former boss, a young writer leaves her life in New York for a second chance at happiness in San Francisco.When Leah learns that her boss, Judy, died in a fatal traffic accident and left her a red sports car, she decides to travel back to San Francisco to pay her respects. Soon, though, it’s clear that Leah’s trip is about more than saying goodbye to Judy and revisiting her West Coast haunts. Until an argument with her husband, Hans, turned physical, Leah didn’t realize how stultifying her marriage—which provided Hans with a green card—actually was. “Why did it feel like my life had stopped once I had gotten married?” Leah asks herself, struggling to understand which partnerships—and their domestic trappings—feel “like the right way to live.” Now, with Judy’s voice carefully commenting on her every move from beyond the grave, Leah follows the signs she believes Judy has left for her. We meet a butch lesbian named Lea; former officemates; a Deadhead mechanic; grad school compatriots; a tech billionaire with a major crush; and a beautiful thief waiting to start her life in Big Sur. In vivid, dreamlike prose, Dermansky (Bad Marie, 2010, etc.) shows us how easy it is to feel like a ghost in your own life—and how difficult it can be to fight your way back to your body. It’s no accident that Dermansky’s nods to literature and pop culture serve as delightful signposts of surrealism—there are strains of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami novels, HBO’s Six Feet Under and psychedelic drug use. At times it’s difficult to tell who is haunting whom—whether Judy is haunting Leah or Leah walks like a specter through her past life in order to—finally—build a future that makes her feel alive. Dermansky delivers a captivating novel about the pursuit of joy that combines dreamlike logic with dark humor, wry observation, and gritty feminism.

Kirkus Reviews