The Passenger by Lisa Lutz
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a three-star cat book but i had a four-star cat time reading it.
it’s a really fun fast ride and you get all caught up in the momentum of its zooom and it’s only when it’s all over and the dust settles that you see the flaws in the vehicle and remember that speeding causes accidents. there’s a reason all the blurbs mention breakneck pace and white-knuckle plot and buckling up & etc, because it’s escapism done perfectly, and it’s a little silly to kick the tires on something that’s just fun, so i won’t, but i will have a spoiler section mostly for my own benefit in which i will hopefully avoid any further automotive analogies.
plot: it’s about a woman whose husband dies under mysterious circumstances and instead of sticking around and answering questions from the police, she has a more extreme reaction – she runs away and changes her identity, her hair color and her entire persona down to what kind of alcohol she drinks. which may seem like overkill, but this isn’t her first go at self-reinvention.
in fact, she goes through so many different identities in the course of this book, i’m not even sure what to call her in the review, so i’m going to have to go with SHE. which will differentiate her from any other females referenced in the review.
so, SHE leaves her home, her life, her name and her money and after reaching back into her past to call in a favor, SHE obtains the documents and cash to start over. again. who are these people? what are these favors?? no time to answer that now; we are on the run! while SHE’s still working out her plan for her new life, SHE meets a woman named blue and they recognize something in each other; something they share that sets them apart from nice normal women leading nice normal lives. and while their story didn’t go in the bad girls roadtrip with possible homoerotic subtext direction i was getting my popcorn ready for, blue still manages to have a profound effect on SHE before fading into the background, leaving us all wanting more.
but no time for longing because we are on the move again.
it’s a really fun book, and the balance of present-day action, teases of backstory, and an alternating set of emails spanning the entirety of SHE’s exile is perfect for keeping the reader off balance, knowing some details, but wanting to know so many more.
the problem is once you have the answers, that’s really all you have. we never get any real insight into SHE’s character, or maybe there’s just nothing to discover; SHE doesn’t have a “self” after years of adopting different personalities. there’s just nothing of SHE to hold onto as a reader. lutz has been very successful writing humorous mysteries, but her lack of experience creating characters like SHE is evident here. this is a series of action sequences without the psychological component, so it ends up reading like a shallow gloss of this kind of character without the meat of what SHE could be in the hands of a different author. there’s really no struggle to her story; there’s plenty of sinuous adaptability, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying because a car chase is a car chase, but what stays in the mind are characters.
again, the issues i had with this book were things i noticed along the way, but which really came into focus after i finished and realized, “oh, so we’re just not gonna address that at all?” which means they’re all spoilers. so, make good choices; if this is where we part ways, know that this book will show you a good time but you might want to eat breakfast alone. and if you’re coming with me to spoilertown, watch your step:
View Spoiler »i think those are all the gripes i can remember at this very moment
anyway, thanks to jim for sending me this book!!
