Phew! I survived! Jaimy Gordon’s second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, is both dense and long. It took me 19 days to finish, which for a blogger trying to keep up on content is forever. Fortunately, I had some other reviews scheduled during this time already.
If Jaimy Gordon sounds familiar, it’s because I love and rave about Bogeywoman, which is also a dense book, but the main character spends most of her time interacting with some of the best-written minor characters I’ve read. Bogeywoman is also 100 pages shorter than She Drove Without Stopping.
In this novel, Jane is born the happiest baby in the world. It’s obvious to readers that something is amiss between her parents, especially the father, who likes to squeeze Jane’s bare buttock from the time she is an infant through high school. As she ages, her father sees her more as a creature that a person. The relationship is toxic, and I’m sure there are odd layers of sexual power battles in there to be picked apart. The narrator implies her father may be gay, though he’s a womanizer. It’s complicated.
Jane heads off to some “beatnik” college circa 1965 where she can’t sleep in the dorms, so she finds an abandoned house to squat in. Along comes a boyfriend, and it’s implied that he’s got a financial net from his parents, but he lives like he’s homeless. He’s an artist, man. Some stoners and junkers from the area, known as The Soul of Commerce, befriend Jane and her boyfriend, and Jaimy Gordon shines again with her secondary characters and their dialogue:
Felix says, “A chicken ain’t even a bird.”
“It ain’t! Then what is it?”
“Felix is silent for a moment, gazing at the darkening cornfield. “It’s a food,” he says. “Man done made it, just like a hot dot. Like baloney. It’s progress.”
“Don’t tell me about progress,” Willie says. “Baloney don’t run around a barnyard flapping its wings.”
Gordon takes us back to the tradition of people sitting on a porch and sharing what they know: stories, observations, old-timey remedies, gossip. These are the best moments in the novel, though they didn’t happen as often in She Drove Without Stopping as it did in Bogeywoman.
Another key difference is that She Drove Without Stopping is in 3rd-person. The narrator is heavy handed while trying to explain what Jane’s motives in life are. The last chapter is in 1st-person, and I felt like I knew Jane infinitely better in those final pages than anywhere else. Bogeywoman was done so well and richly in 1st-person that I felt a million miles away from Jane — and I didn’t like nor empathize with her. I do wish there had been less focus on Jane’s internal life via an omniscient narrator who almost seems to not know Jane.
The novel says a lot about how women and minorities are treated in the United States. Many characters Jane befriends are African American or Native American. She herself is white, but she’s the victim of power dynamics between men and women, authorities and women. When a strange man forces himself on her, Jane is not believed by the local police, who work to prove she’s a whore for hanging out with a Black man.
Given that it’s 1965, Gordon says a lot about that year without directly point out what happened in history that year. It’s a clever way of saying something without saying it. I’m especially thinking of the way I keep reading novels that are set in NYC when 9/11 happened, but 9/11 is only tangentially related to the story. Or, how many civil rights novels find the main character marching to Selma or at the March on Washington. Do they need to be there for this novel to say something about the Civil Rights Movement?
Although it takes patience and perseverance, Gordon’s second novel never made me want to quit reading, though I didn’t read for as long as I typically would each sitting. It’s a traditional Bildungsroman with the ending we all must learn — that we are just like our parents in ways we don’t want to be — but it’s all the people whom she encounters who make this novel interesting.
Grab the Lapels 
This does sound like one of those novels where those secondary characters are at least as interesting as the main ones. You make an interesting point about first person v third person. I go back and forth on that. In the main, I prefer third person. But sometimes, as you say, you get to know a character much better if that character’s story is told in first person.
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The secondary characters were actually more interesting!
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The father sounds more than a little odd! I reckon if my husband liked to squeeze my daughter’s bare buttock, there’d be something wrong in my marriage too… 😉
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There are mentions of him not wanting to wear anything that might make him look “queer.” Since the book is set around 1945 to 1965, that might just mean “odd,” and regardless of his sexuality, he’s odd.
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Hmm… trying to remember way back, I do think my dad used to use the word “queer” disparagingly in the ’60s, though at the time I didn’t really understand what he meant by it. And he was middle-aged by then, so maybe it would have been in use back in the ’40s, though not with the positive spin on it that only happened in maybe the ’90s or so?
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Ugh the description of the father makes me sick to my stomach! I hate reading about that stuff, I find it so painful. The secondary characters do sound pretty interesting in this one too though. I’ve read books like this before-you can’t read them for long periods of time, or they take you a few weeks to finish, but they are still worth it!
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When I wasn’t reading it, I didn’t feel the need to pick it up, but when I was reading it, I was happy.
I thought the father would be in the whole book, but when she went away to college, he was just the occasional phone call. When she was a child though, I kept waiting for something worse to happen. Then again, women are trained to think, “Well, at least he only did X. He never did Y to his daughter.”
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yes that’s (unfortunately) very true
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19 days is a long time for readers and bloggers like us. I know when I take over a week to finish a book – unless it’s a short story collection or nonfiction – I start to look at other books longingly, LOL.
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I just kept mourning how I was on track with my reading goals, and now I’m not.
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Yes! Me too!
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I love it when books can say things without actually saying them. Not all authors are good at this – it must not be an easy thing to do.
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I think authors assume they HAVE to say something important–Fiction Fan mentions this frequently–but the obvious important messages seem heavy handed.
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I’m glad I’m not the only one who hesitates to pick up big books because they impact on my blogging. As a baby boomer I’m also hesitant about reading younger authors who set their work in the 1960s – historical fiction to them! But it was certainly a period when fathers, and any other man who was around, exerted their power over girls. I’m not sure my own father ever mentioned gays, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have known what he meant if he did.
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I believe Jaimy Gordon is in her 70s, so she’s not a younger author.
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19 days is forever in the life of a book blogger. Sometimes I get stuck with a book and it feels like I’m making in very little progress. I end up making myself read more than I want or need to which isn’t always the best choice (it messes with how much I enjoy a book) but I feel like there is only so much time I can spend on a book before I need to move on. Perhaps it’s one of the drawbacks to being a book blogger.
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If I weren’t a book blogger, I would put reading somewhere behind watching the newest season of BoJack Horseman. I would have even noticed it was 19 days because my brain would have just assumed it read more than I did.
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I’m surprised that She Drove without Stopping, being the second book Gordon published, didn’t seem to connect with you as much as her first. It sounds like her writing didn’t improve between books. That said, it doesn’t sound like her writing is poor in the first place– it’s just an interesting observation.
Is this the sort of book where you already need to know about America in 1965 to appreciate what Gordon is saying without saying about the world at this time? Or do you think someone with limited knowledge of this time might still appreciate it?
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If you have limited knowledge–that it’s scandelous for an 19-year-old white girl to be living in an abandoned house with her artist boyfriend, and that she deserves what she gets because she hangs around with a black man (even though it’s a white man who rates her), then you know enough about the time period for sure.
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Hahaha. Okay, so this is more about the mentality at the time rather than specific events which happened in 1965. Because, let me tell you, my internal timeline is decent but not accurate. There’s a card game called Timeline where you put events in chronological order (it’s more fun than that sounds, I promise!) and I am TERRIBLE at it. Just the worst. David is always laughing at how inaccurate I tend to be. XD
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That actually sounds really fun! We I play trivia with my friends, we always struggle with this one category asking which thing was invented first. You get options like Pepsi or Coke, or the charcoal briquettes or fortune cookies.
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Oh man! That sounds SO HARD. Also. I’m guessing Charcoal before Fortune Cookies. No idea on Pepsi vs. Coke… Coke?
Do you play live trivia?
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It’s live trivia at a firefighter’s union. Charcoal came first. I believe Pepsi came first. We win a lot (though there are usually only 4 teams).
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Nice! I used to play live trivia all the time. I’m… not great at it. But our live trivia features a lot of Science, Modern American History (aka: Post WWII, aka stuff I never studied), and Pop Culture.
All subjects I struggle with.
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Jeez. We got asked who the dudes are waiting for in a very famous play. I feel like we got the easy ones!
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Yes! Gadot! I can do that one. I want to play your trivia games. 😉
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[…] love interest that’s not worthy of being one. The summer boyfriend in Jaimy Gordon’s She Drove Without Stopping. He had money but played the starving artist, was a cheat, barely attentive. Why is the narrator […]
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[…] list. I was worried that it would wander aimlessly, like Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood or She Drive Without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon. Although readers of Grab the Lapels and on Goodreads had concerns about the novel, […]
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