Train Wreck Girl by Sean Carswell
Carswell, Sean, Train Wreck Girl. San Francisco: Manic D Press. 2008. paper,ISBN: 978-1-933149-21-9
Before I go any further, know that Train Wreck Girl will easily be one of the best novels of 2008. At 20 pages in, the earth paused. I remained absolutely entranced through the final page. Novels like this don’t happen very often, so pay attention.
Train Wreck Girl poses as a fairly straightforward story of a man traveling cross-country to flee his past, returning years later, only to re-immerse in all that he tried to originally escape. He’s outgrown this childhood town of Cocoa Beach, FL, but only in width. The slug line describes the narrative beautifully: One man’s quest to figure out what to do with his life now that it is too late for him to die young.
Beyond the immediately arresting imaginative structural elements (the first chapter is told as a countdown to New Year’s, 1999; some following chapters are told as itineraries outlining the protagonist’s day life) is a narrative so beautifully balanced between plot and character that it wasn’t uncommon for me to breeze through 50 pages without realizing a single blink.
The protagonist, Dan, for example, is a poor, seemingly uneducated man, yet carries an impressive cultural awareness that artfully dodges the dirty savant trope so common with “hard life” literature:
She called me white trash. Which hurt. The “trash” part I can take. But I don’t know why she had to throw “white” in there. [pg. 18]
Or this observation, when introducing two of the narrator’s old friends:
Marigold wore a ring on her left ring finger. Christian didn’t. I took that to mean they were engaged. [pg. 45]
It is this uncanny ability to completely mine a character with initially apparent minutiae that allows Train Wreck Girl to avoid so many potential pitfalls into character-generic cliché. This could have easily been a simple crime novel, a straightforward road trip story, or even a terrible love story. But it isn’t. Perhaps it is this very ability to tease, while simultaneously comforting the reader that carries the novel.
Here’s the ultimate test of a successful novel: can the story humanize a scene involving people farting on a corpse? Train Wreck Girl can, and does.
“Dirty savant trope.” Nice. It’s often as if authors WANT to write lower-class characters, yet are afraid those inherent linguistic limitations will reflect on their own literary abilities somehow, so they have to find some way to still get their verbosity in. But I like the way you say it better.
Hard to pull off, definitely, to impose faith in idiot characters and in you, the author, simultaneously.
Maybe “dirty savant trope” will show up in the NY Times crosswords someday; 15 Across: another name for strangely intelligent mainstay character at a bar.