Summer Series!

Today's post initiates a special summer series,  "Drivers Ed for Poets," in which we explore the diverse and often fraught relationship of writers to their cars (and others'). We begin with this quote, which occurs early in Renata Adler's 1983 novel Pitch Dark, just reissued by New

York Review Books:

Well, what did you pull ahead of me on the road for, from a side street, when there were no other cars in sight behind me, if you were going to drive more slowly than I did? (p. 8)

Adler's reported speech is pitch perfect, as always, and her vignettes of urban, intellectual society mercilessly precise. But what does it all add up to?

It reminds me of what my college Chaucer professor replied, when asked by a student what contemporary writers he read: "None, aside from detective novels. Otherwise they are all the same: People in apartments having relationships." Still, good beach reading if you like your the schadenfreude warm and your shade cool.