This is a dark, feverish, and weird tale that remains compelling throughout. Lou’s excruciating day will make readers cringe, and the recounting of his traumas is more than unsettling. Durkee tackles race and poverty, violence of many varieties, loss and longing, and the power of the imagination. In Lou, Durkee has created a fascinatingly complex character. Decentralized, atomized, and alternately tranquilized and jacked up on cheap beer and meth, this is the world of Beckett, Godard, Robbe-Grillet.
The Last Taxi Driver is a Canterbury Tales for our time. Yet somehow, the author creates such a vivid likeness of life that readers can’t help but feel uplifted. The working-class realism of Charles Bukowski with the countercultural flamboyance of Hunter S. The novel almost makes other fiction in that Southern tradition seem frivolous by comparison.
#THE LAST TAXI DRIVER BY LEE DURKEE FULL#
This twenty-year follow up to his debut novel, Rides of the Midway, was worth the wait.Ī gonzo ride full of dark humor, philosophical insights, and shrewd observations about the plight of luckless people in the United States. Much of what makes Lee Durkee’s novel so delightful and surprising is his ability to dig beneath the surface of this funny, well-told odyssey, which channels a Shakespearean tragedy. Follow the air freshener rocking back and forth, taking you under its spell, as Durkee takes you for a ride. William Boyle, author of City of Marginsįor devotees of the offbeat and grit lit writers like Larry Brown and Mary Miller. Raw, revelatory, honest, full of kindness and anger and sadness and compassion. Haven’t felt this way since reading Jesus’ Son and Bringing Out the Dead for the first time. Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked LetterĪ stone cold masterpiece.
George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo I loved this book and felt jangled and inspired and changed by it. Durkee is a true original-a wise and wildly talented writer who knows something profound about that special strain of American darkness that comes out of blended paucity, materialism, and addiction-but also, in the joy and honesty and wit of the prose, he offers a way out. part Denis Johnson-ish carnival of the wrecked, part Nietzschean Twilight of the Gods (or Twilight of the Taxicabs).Ī wild, funny, poetic fever-dream that will change the way you think about America. Raunchy and sweet and, at times, psychedelic. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee’s darkly comic novel is a feverish, hilarious, and gritty look at a forgotten America and a man at life’s crossroads.ĭisarmingly honest and darkly comic. Shedding nuts and bolts, The Last Taxi Driver careens through highways and back roads, from Mississippi to Memphis, as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Lou is forced to decide how much he can take as a driver, and whether keeping his job is worth madness and heartbreak. With Uber moving into town and his way of life vanishing, his girlfriend moving out, and his archenemy dispatcher suddenly returning to town on the lam, Lou must finish his bedlam shift by aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his disintegrating Town Car. Meet Lou-a lapsed novelist, struggling Buddhist, and UFO fan-who drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town. Hailed by George Saunders as “a true original-a wise and wildly talented writer,” Lee Durkee takes readers on a high-stakes cab ride through an unforgettable shift.
“A wild, funny, poetic fever dream that will change the way you think about America.” -George Saunders
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