Through The Windshield - Softcover

DeCapite, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966659201 ISBN 13: 9780966659207

Publisher: Sparkle st Books, 1998

Synopsis

Through The Windshield is the terrific first novel by Michael DeCapite and the first release from Sparkle Street Books of San Francisco. Circulated in manuscript and widely excerpted in literary magazines, the novel became a word-of-mouth classic in the late '80s and early '90s.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael DeCapite was born in Cleveland in 1962. Through The Windshield was written in Cleveland, London, and New York 1985-1990 and subsequently revised. DeCapite is currently completing a second novel, and his short story "Sitting Pretty" is forthcoming in 1999 from CUZ Editions.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"I stepped outa the bar and the night squealed and roared like a truck. Or waitaminute maybe it was a truck, squeezing to a stop...or maybe the circus went past/ the light went through a series of quick subtle variations, shedding itself like snakeskin. Nobody noticed but me."

Alternately soulful, ecstatic, cynical, and painfully funny, Through The Windshield follows its narrator, Danny, from his job as a Cleveland taxi driver through a summer of misadventures with his hilarious gambler friend and mentor, Ed, to a darkening autumn as a porno store clerk and late-night spot laborer as he searches for transcendence and a way out of town. The year is spent, for the most part, among hookers, gamblers, and barflies, and for the rest in solitude, watching the weather and wondering how far down one should be prepared to pare one's hopes.

"Let me put it this way: Jimmy started out as a gambler on Bolivar Road betting fifteen-cent baseball parlays. His face when he takes off his shades is like a small full moon seen through passing cloud. He has the wide glazed look of a man who's been watching baseball bets go out the window since the days of Ty Cobb...of a man who thought he'd seen every way a horserace can be lost. He takes a kind of quiet bitter pride in having survived years of defeats that would've killed a more sensible man: his eyes look as though he's watching himself in disbelief."

A kaleidoscope of dead-on dialogue, wild storytelling, unforgettable characters, and haunting description, Through The Windshield is an attempt to present experience in all its raw and subtle beauty, as it happens.

"My ears're ringing. Above the far-off sound of passing mystery trains and the wavering all-night sound of the mill valley, they are ringing. I close my eyes and can almost see the red blinking lights of radio towers, and also the slow candlelit procession, below and against the packed and collected squids of night."

About this edition

• Publisher: Sparkle st Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0966659201
• ISBN 13: 9780966659207
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 457