Until science solves for the mysteries of the mind, the age-old debate of nature versus nurture will continue to percolate, propelled onward by the desire to understand unfathomable humanity. Why do some of us become saints and others sociopaths? Why do some of us have indomitable tempers while others possess uninterruptable serenity? Why do some of us drive ourselves to the heights of fame and fortune while others never make it out of our neighborhoods? Questions and accusations, theories and excuses, abound, some of them helpful, others generated from bias. Until we have a roadmap to human nature, we're left with only our intuitions and our suppositions, a circumstantial uncertainty played to eerie effect in James Sallis' brief but bloody piece of crime fiction.
A son of the American Southwest, birthed from a home of deep dysfunction, the Driver moves through life as if it were a movie. He remembers meals and jobs, girls and cars, but the rest is sloughed off as vestigial to his Polaroid life. Lacking even a name, he is a quiet ghost in the City of Angels, performing car stunts for Hollywood by day and acting as the wheelman for criminals by night, a dual life that seems to suit him quite well, that is, until two transplanted connected gangsters from old New York decide to tear up the rulebook to their underworld game, stalking him for ill-gotten gains Driver would have happily returned if they had the courtesy to ask nicely. That they don't is, for Driver, causes belli and the fallout promises to be spectacular.
Barely a hundred pages, Drive is nearly a perfect piece of dark, summer reading. Emerging from the swift, flashy tradition of crime fiction popularized by Elmore Leonard et al, Mr. Sallis has constructed a series of dramatic, even moving vignettes that act upon the narrative like flashbulbs, momentarily shedding light on fragments of time in the life of a man (Driver) who has only a foothold in our world, the rest of his nature lost to some netherspace of deeds and apparitions. Consequently, Driver, the only character who claims more than perhaps ten percent of the tale, is a person barely glimpsed, his motives hidden behind a creepily affectless facade that Mr. Sallis has miraculously imbued with magnetism, not repulsiveness.
Reducing his cast to but one serious player is, for the author, a toss of the dice, a roll made in the confident hope that Driver will captivate readers. And he does. For he is not a simple monster who demands that we accept his nihilism-as-parable for 21st-century America. Rather, he is a deeply damaged person who has come to imprint upon the world certain codes of conduct that are, for him, inviolate. This is not some ancient skein of honor upon thieves co-opted from the Mediterranean. It is the means of his survival in a world that, without his rules, is completely inexplicable. In this, is just like everyone else he shares the world with. The difference rises only when we contemplate the particular codes which, for a man who does not seem to feel pain, much less emotion of any kind, are quite apart from the ones we would know. This is why he is a creature of fascination. He is a puzzle, not an animal.
There are other pleasures here, certainly. Mr. Sallis' Los Angeles operates in that entertaining pretend space of urban cities devoid of law-enforcement, a world fully endorsed by Hollywood that suggests that civilization is merely a series of encounters and exchanges moderated by the threat of violence and the possession of power. This may be absurd, but it is also profoundly appealing, offering up a glimpse of an unrestrained life that our savage sides long to experience. It is the forbidden sandbox of no holds barred that we all left behind AS toddlers learning that we had to accept society's chains in exchange for life. This adrenaline hit never gets old.
A rewarding read... (4/5 Stars)
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