She Drove Without Stopping
SKU:
1364
$15.00
$15.00
per item
Paperback, 390 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 1993, 2012, 0-929701-36-4
"This may be the novel that women have been trying to write for the last thirty years... [She Drove Without Stopping] offers a wider variety of pleasures than just about any so-called 'women's' classic one can think of. This is a feminist monster from the id: omnivorous, roaring and wildly colorful." — John Domini, American Book Review
Twenty-year-old Jane Turner sets off on a cross-country adventure, and by the end of her reckless, risky year on the road she's been in love, in danger, in jail, and at last in control again of her own life. Jaimy Gordon, whose earlier books have earned her reputation as a brilliant stylist, here tells the story of a very young, very bold American woman deciding what she wants, and along the way reveals secrets of a special and particularly American woman.
"Jane Turner, carfare in her palm and defiance in her heart, is one of the ablest heroines ever to track the American landscape." — Jayne Anne Phillips
"I don't believe there is any protagonist in contemporary fiction quite like Jane. ...She Drove Without Stopping is a wondrous and important book." —John Hawkes
"I haven't heard a voice like Jaimy Gordon's anywhere. ... [This] is a unique and valuable book." — Rosellen Brown
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"The dream of perpetual motion is what animates this sexy and lyrical novel." — Voice Literary Supplement
"Raucous, sexy, thrilling, urgent, coming-of-age women's road novel. Highly recommended."--The Independent Reader
"Gordon writes like a woman with a gun to her head. She crowds her paragraphs with startling outsize metaphors that perfectly encapsulate the wild coming-of-age of 21-year-old Jane, an aspiring adventuress. . . . The vigorousness of its writing style, the way complex themes snake through one chapter after another, the sheer virtue of the lowlife heroes who pop up throughout -- all will convince readers to hitch a ride with Jane. It's well worth the trip." — ALA Booklist
"The book is a brave and miraculous piece of fiction, written with verve, guts and power from beginning to end. Let's not forget humor, anger and rebelliousness either....She Drove Without Stopping is a picaresque novel, one that follows the life of its hero, Jane Turner (a stand-in for the author?) over the course of a fifteen-year period. . . .The book turns into a road novel for a while — metaphorically Jane goes deeper and deeper into the beautiful but tainted USA. Journey's end is Los Angeles and its underbelly — Jane is always drawn to the lower depths, especially the odd, raffish characters who frequent it. There, among her fellow-dropouts, she finds a measure of happiness and perhaps even redemption. Gordon is an American Celine, a writer who is able to find humanity in all the wrong places." — Willard Manus, What's Up, and Lively-Arts.com
"Gordon's prose is witty and stylish, the kind of unblinking writing that isn't afraid to admit of a woman whooping it up all night, then waking next morning, disgusted and not a little elated to discover just how close to the edge she's crawled. Readers up to following Jane on her hell-bent journey are in for quite a trip." — Washington Post Book World
"The novel's greatest strength is the distinctive narrative voice adopted by Gordon, whose third-person narrative maintains a dry, gravely, witty tone, no matter how shocking the events being recounted. . . . The overall effect is of an older, experienced intelligence looking back on her younger self, ordering the events of her adventurous past with rueful good humor and an appealing lack of rancor." — Chicago Tribune
Feminist picaresque with a memorable protagonist (AMAZON) 5 stars October 7, 2011
"Sheesh! Where to begin? How do you boil down, summarize, explain or critique a story as big and complex as SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING? It's a novel that is so unique it seems to defy easy comparisons. Jaimy Gordon has created, in Jane Turner, a character to be admired and pitied simultaneously. Because she is without question a victim, but she adamantly refuses to be a victim. Does that make sense? Probably not, but there it is. I'll try to explain this, but probably won't succeed.
SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is essentially Jane's life story, or at least the first 21 years of it. She is the middle child (there are two sisters who remain minor characters) of a successful corporate lawyer who dotes on her for the first eight years of her life. Indeed there appears to be a pattern of inappropriate squeezing, groping and fondling on the part of the father, Philip Turner. And if there is one particular villain in the story it is the philandering father, referred to by even Jane as simply 'Philip Turner.' Jane's mother is something of a basket case who makes regular visits to her analyst, Dr. Zwilling, while attending to her daughters in a more or less robotic fashion.
Confused by all the fatherly groping, Jane is nevertheless devastated when her father ceases to lavish attention on her and even begins to act as though he hates her and finds her repulsive. Jane's puberty and junior high and high school years are a tortuous horror for her. (But hey, isn't it for all of us, come to think of it?) But packed off to the unusually liberal 'Harmonia College' in rural Ohio, Jane finally busts loose, buying a car and moving off campus and making friends with a rather grotesque group of locals, including Willie D. Usher, the Soul of Commerce; Felix the bartender at the Downtown Rec Club; Fred Blood the grocery clerk; Officer Rollo the local constable; unemployed actor Roger O. Booth (aka Albert Huzzy), who is the friend (camp follower) of California golden boy artist Jimmy Fluharty. Jane is smitten almost immediately with Jimmy and they move into an abandoned farmhouse together and spend a lot of time making the beast with two backs as well as other sexual shapes. Jimmy seems to be a person who loves himself more than anyone else, but Jane doesn't care - there's unquestionably a lot more lust than love in the relationship.
But RAPE intervenes, and, finding justice not forthcoming, Jane flees, first back home to Baltimore where her parents are in the middle of a bitter divorce. So she hits the road in her 'moneygreen Buick' for further misadventures. The secondary and primary roads west seem a lot like Huck Finn's Mississippi - filled with more characters, more 'adventures.' And when she hits Los Angeles and joins up with Jimmy again, another whole cast of grotesques assemble - Cochise and Mama, Billy and Marie, Raymozo the Rayman, and even Dr. Zwilling turns up again, transplanted to the west coast as a new-age therapist.
Like I said at the beginning, this is a really BIG book, bigger even than its 390 pages might suggest. There is a whole life in here, Jane Turner's life, and how she interacts with an enormous cast of well-defined characters. Jane is highly sexed, confused and, most of all, ANGRY, although she's not quite sure why. Because, as she states more than once, she began life as an extremely happy baby. Her subsequent family life, however, is a horror, and things continue to get worse as poor Jane is alienated, humiliated, raped and scorned. (A sequence of events that left me feeling faintly guilty just for being male.) And yet, fear not, because at the very end there is the hint of a kind of redemption and freedom. And hey, if we're lucky, maybe even a sequel. The book is twenty years old now, and I can't help wondering how Jane's life turned out. So yeah, maybe a sequel would be in order. It's a BIG book, a LONG book, but by God - and pardon my cliche - it is 'gripping human drama.' Jaimy Gordon knows how to tell a story. And SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is a darn good one." —Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER
"Raucous, sexy, thrilling, urgent, coming-of-age women's road novel. Highly recommended."--The Independent Reader
"Gordon writes like a woman with a gun to her head. She crowds her paragraphs with startling outsize metaphors that perfectly encapsulate the wild coming-of-age of 21-year-old Jane, an aspiring adventuress. . . . The vigorousness of its writing style, the way complex themes snake through one chapter after another, the sheer virtue of the lowlife heroes who pop up throughout -- all will convince readers to hitch a ride with Jane. It's well worth the trip." — ALA Booklist
"The book is a brave and miraculous piece of fiction, written with verve, guts and power from beginning to end. Let's not forget humor, anger and rebelliousness either....She Drove Without Stopping is a picaresque novel, one that follows the life of its hero, Jane Turner (a stand-in for the author?) over the course of a fifteen-year period. . . .The book turns into a road novel for a while — metaphorically Jane goes deeper and deeper into the beautiful but tainted USA. Journey's end is Los Angeles and its underbelly — Jane is always drawn to the lower depths, especially the odd, raffish characters who frequent it. There, among her fellow-dropouts, she finds a measure of happiness and perhaps even redemption. Gordon is an American Celine, a writer who is able to find humanity in all the wrong places." — Willard Manus, What's Up, and Lively-Arts.com
"Gordon's prose is witty and stylish, the kind of unblinking writing that isn't afraid to admit of a woman whooping it up all night, then waking next morning, disgusted and not a little elated to discover just how close to the edge she's crawled. Readers up to following Jane on her hell-bent journey are in for quite a trip." — Washington Post Book World
"The novel's greatest strength is the distinctive narrative voice adopted by Gordon, whose third-person narrative maintains a dry, gravely, witty tone, no matter how shocking the events being recounted. . . . The overall effect is of an older, experienced intelligence looking back on her younger self, ordering the events of her adventurous past with rueful good humor and an appealing lack of rancor." — Chicago Tribune
Feminist picaresque with a memorable protagonist (AMAZON) 5 stars October 7, 2011
"Sheesh! Where to begin? How do you boil down, summarize, explain or critique a story as big and complex as SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING? It's a novel that is so unique it seems to defy easy comparisons. Jaimy Gordon has created, in Jane Turner, a character to be admired and pitied simultaneously. Because she is without question a victim, but she adamantly refuses to be a victim. Does that make sense? Probably not, but there it is. I'll try to explain this, but probably won't succeed.
SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is essentially Jane's life story, or at least the first 21 years of it. She is the middle child (there are two sisters who remain minor characters) of a successful corporate lawyer who dotes on her for the first eight years of her life. Indeed there appears to be a pattern of inappropriate squeezing, groping and fondling on the part of the father, Philip Turner. And if there is one particular villain in the story it is the philandering father, referred to by even Jane as simply 'Philip Turner.' Jane's mother is something of a basket case who makes regular visits to her analyst, Dr. Zwilling, while attending to her daughters in a more or less robotic fashion.
Confused by all the fatherly groping, Jane is nevertheless devastated when her father ceases to lavish attention on her and even begins to act as though he hates her and finds her repulsive. Jane's puberty and junior high and high school years are a tortuous horror for her. (But hey, isn't it for all of us, come to think of it?) But packed off to the unusually liberal 'Harmonia College' in rural Ohio, Jane finally busts loose, buying a car and moving off campus and making friends with a rather grotesque group of locals, including Willie D. Usher, the Soul of Commerce; Felix the bartender at the Downtown Rec Club; Fred Blood the grocery clerk; Officer Rollo the local constable; unemployed actor Roger O. Booth (aka Albert Huzzy), who is the friend (camp follower) of California golden boy artist Jimmy Fluharty. Jane is smitten almost immediately with Jimmy and they move into an abandoned farmhouse together and spend a lot of time making the beast with two backs as well as other sexual shapes. Jimmy seems to be a person who loves himself more than anyone else, but Jane doesn't care - there's unquestionably a lot more lust than love in the relationship.
But RAPE intervenes, and, finding justice not forthcoming, Jane flees, first back home to Baltimore where her parents are in the middle of a bitter divorce. So she hits the road in her 'moneygreen Buick' for further misadventures. The secondary and primary roads west seem a lot like Huck Finn's Mississippi - filled with more characters, more 'adventures.' And when she hits Los Angeles and joins up with Jimmy again, another whole cast of grotesques assemble - Cochise and Mama, Billy and Marie, Raymozo the Rayman, and even Dr. Zwilling turns up again, transplanted to the west coast as a new-age therapist.
Like I said at the beginning, this is a really BIG book, bigger even than its 390 pages might suggest. There is a whole life in here, Jane Turner's life, and how she interacts with an enormous cast of well-defined characters. Jane is highly sexed, confused and, most of all, ANGRY, although she's not quite sure why. Because, as she states more than once, she began life as an extremely happy baby. Her subsequent family life, however, is a horror, and things continue to get worse as poor Jane is alienated, humiliated, raped and scorned. (A sequence of events that left me feeling faintly guilty just for being male.) And yet, fear not, because at the very end there is the hint of a kind of redemption and freedom. And hey, if we're lucky, maybe even a sequel. The book is twenty years old now, and I can't help wondering how Jane's life turned out. So yeah, maybe a sequel would be in order. It's a BIG book, a LONG book, but by God - and pardon my cliche - it is 'gripping human drama.' Jaimy Gordon knows how to tell a story. And SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING is a darn good one." —Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER
The full review of SDWS in Review of Contemporary Fiction
https://writinghollywood.com/she-drove-without-stopping/Marilyn-Ann-Moss
An excellent interview about Gordon's writing process
https://www.tingemagazine.org/an-interview-with-jaimy-gordon/
https://writinghollywood.com/she-drove-without-stopping/Marilyn-Ann-Moss
An excellent interview about Gordon's writing process
https://www.tingemagazine.org/an-interview-with-jaimy-gordon/