The Car Thief - Softcover

Weesner, Theodore

3.83 out of 5 stars

198 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938231007 ISBN 13: 9781938231001

Publisher: Astor + Blue Editions, 2013

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It's 1959. Sixteen year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working class, father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy Plant in Detroit, looking forward to the flask in his glove compartment, and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan home. Abandoned and alone, father and son struggle to express a deep love for each other, even as Alex fills his day juggling cheap thrills and a crushing depression. He cruises and steals, running from-and then forcing run-ins with-the police, compelled by reasons he frustratingly can't put into words. And then there's Irene Shaeffer, the pretty girl in school whose admiration Alex needs like a drug in order to get by. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a 'New York Times' reviewer called “one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction.”

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About the Author

Theodore Weesner, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as “Writers’ Writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Short Stories. His novels, including The True Detective, Winning the City, and Harbor Light, have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, Washington Post, Harper’s, Boston Globe, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times to name a few. He is currently writing his memoir, two new novels, and an adaptation of his widely praised novel—retitled Winning the City Redux—also to be published by Astor + Blue Editions. He lives and works in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Review

"One of the great coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century... Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart."—Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Bestselling Author of Broken Towers, Faith, Mrs. Kimple and The Condition

“Remarkable, gripping..."
—Joyce Carol Oates, Author of Them, The Wheel of Love, and Wonderland

“Weesner’s perfectly restrained and subtle exploration of the characters’ painful and often difficult emotions caused me to have an intimate and emotional connection to a character and story of such a seemingly distant world. It taught me that even the most personal of stories can be universal and it is with this belief that I have adapted The Car Thief into what I hope will be a film that does some justice to the most beautiful novel that ever broke my heart.”
—Dara Van Dusen, Filmmaker

“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautiful written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”
—Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe

“A simply marvelous novel. Alex (the protagonist) emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”
—Kansas City Star

“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief—like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”
—S. K. Oberbeck, Newsweek

“The measure of Weesner’s very great achievement is that he has endowned [his characters’] lives with such compelling interest and, even more, a certain beauty.”
—The Boston Globe

“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled... and then some.”
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times