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Review
Many mechanically impaired individuals such as myself look under the hood of a car and see nothing but the spaghetti of wires, lugs, bolts, belts, and gizmos. The author of this unusual and intriguing novel, which is set at the pump of a gas station, must look at sentences and syntax the same way. Check out the nuts and bolts of his prose: "Turn off the Fellsway up Oak can we make the hill lucky not to burn out motor or transmission four wheels spinning broken chains slapping into the station lot sleep in the garage, rubber-tire beds, fender guards for blankets." If words were wires, I'd hate to see how his car runs. Entirely quirky and entertaining.
From Kirkus Reviews
More of a prose poem than a conventional novel, Torra's debut is set in the '60s at the gas station operated by the adolescent narrator's father in a working-class Massachusetts town, offering a compendium of thick description and male anecdote. At the center of this study in ordinary life is the narrator's father, a hard-working Italian immigrant with chronic agita, and a weakness for the dogtrack and women (other than his stove-bound wife). Weaving back and forth in time, Torra's pronounless prose records the casual speech of the station workers and hangers-on, an endless stream of boasts about sex, along with jokes about masturbation and homosexuality. From his grime-covered perspective, the narrator comments on local events: A boy drowns nearby; the town endures a devastating fire; his father moves out. But the real poetry is closer by: the naming of parts of an engine; the craft of doing detail work on choice automobiles. In the local culture of baksheesh, the narrator's father sweetens the cops for local towing rights, greases the corrupt station inspectors, and satisfies the voracious appetites of the gas franchise rep. The drama shakes only their small world: His father invests in oil filters that turn out to be faulty; a rust-chip lodges in the narrator's eye; a stolen- car scandal comes too close to home. Social commentary begins to stir when the narrator notices the cover-up of a drunken priest's Christmas Day accident, begins to drift into the psychedelic subculture of the times, and turns down his obvious patrimony. The father sells the station and their loyal station dog dies, as does a less complicated era, but not before the men buy the boy his first backseat tumble with the fat local prostitute. Torra strings together lots of short, declarative sentences into long flowing word-hoards. Annoying at first, it becomes as intoxicating (and dizzying) as the smell of gasoline. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherOrion mass market paperback
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0575402334
- ISBN 13 9780575402331
- BindingPaperback
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