Last Chance Texaco
by Christine Pountney
Faber and Faber, 263 pp.
Christine Pountney was born in Vancouver, grew up in Montreal and now lives in London. Her first book, Last Chance Texaco, is a rousing road-trip novel. Pountney’s young Quixote, John Wade, begins his journey in Bella Colla, B.C., grows up in small-town coastal California, and at 18 sets out cross-continent in a Dodge Omni. All he knows for sure is that he wants to get to New York City.
The novel is built of three polished sections – three chances for the young man to find his way. They’re each so complete that they might have been left as novellas, but together make an impressive triptych. Part One involves the new girl in town, Anna. Part Two is the broke hitchhiker, Hannah. Part Three is John’s (and the Omni’s) breakdown and recovery at a health food store in upstate New York. If this all sounds a bit too cute for its own good, Pountney’s tale does verge on the sort of naiveté which made Paolo Coelho’s 1987 novella, The Alchemist, such a big seller.
Still, Pountney’s novel succeeds in its own right. She writes in an unadorned, modern style that suits her story well. You can almost feel the characters ache as they drive through the heat of the desert, stopping for cigarettes and supper at a roadside diner. She writes, "I looked around the café.... It was seven-thirty in the evening. I wanted to hold onto that moment. I wanted to trap it, to stop time, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t control the outcome, but I wanted Hannah to know how desperately I needed this to work."
Last Chance Texaco does work. Anyone desperate to get away this winter might just begin with this book. |
