It’s 1959. Sixteen year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn’t know why. His divorced, working class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy Plant in Detroit, kept afloat by the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles in his Flint, Michigan home.
Abandoned and alone, father and son struggle to express a deep love for each other, even as Alex fills his day juggling cheap thrills and a crushing depression. He cruises and steals, running from, and to, the police, compelled by reasons he frustratingly can’t put into words. And then there’s Irene Shaeffer, the pretty girl in school whose admiration Alex needs like a drug in order to get by. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives hurtle toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called “one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction.”
In this rich, beautifully crafted story, Weesner accomplishes a rare feat: He’s written a transcendent piece of literature in deceptively plain language, painting a gripping portrait of a father and a son, otherwise invisible among the mundane, everyday details of life in blue collar America. A true and enduring American classic.
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E-book: 305 Pages
Published May 1st 2012 by Astor and Blue Editions (first published 1973)
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Review:
Wow, what an inspiring book! THE CAR THEIF is a beautifully crafted coming of age story. We see the story through Alex Housman’s eyes. A young boy living in a very broken world in the late 1950’s. He lives alone with his alcoholic father. His mother has left and started a new life with a new husband, taking his younger brother with her. He steals cars, not even really understanding himself why he does it. We see his journey through school, into the youth detention center after he’s arrested, and back into his father’s custody again. All the while watching him grow. This story was wonderfully deep and heartbreaking. The author’s descriptive writing paints every scene so perfectly that you feel like you are watching it unfold right in front of your eyes. I know this book was told from a teen’s POV, but I would recommend it to any age reader that enjoys a good coming of age story.
