Book Details
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The "Blue Collar Holden Caulfield"
Modern American Classic Re-Surfaces for New Generation of Readers
Described as “one of the best coming of age novels of the Twentieth Century,” Theodore Weesner’s modern American classic is now re-launched for a new generation of readers to discover.
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, looking forward to the flask in his glove compartment, and the open bottles of booze 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 then forcing run-ins with—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 unfold 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 powerful 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theodore Weesner, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “Writers’ Writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly and Best American Short Stories. His novels, including The True Detective, Winning the City and Harbor Light, have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine and The Los Angeles Times to name a few.
Weesner is currently writing his memoir, two new novels, and an adaptation of his widely praised novel—retitled Winning the City Redux—also to be published by Astor + Blue Editions. He lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.
UNIVERSAL PRAISE FOR THE CAR THIEF:
From the New York Times Book Review, by Joseph McElroy:
At the risk of sentimental commonplace and pedestrian naturalism Theodore Weesner in his first novel ‘The Car Thief’ has written a story so modestly precise and so movingly inevitable that before I knew what was happening to me I felt in the grip of some kind of thriller. But it’s not quite the thriller you might think from the title.
A car is not only wheels, it is also somewhere to be. It is a defining space equipped with push-button windows, radio, ashtray, rear-view mirror, upholstery, horsepower, style. A 16-year-old who steals cars may be wanting more than a ride, for in some ways we are what we drive.
Mr. Weesner’s hero is not a figure in a case-study, though what drives Alex is made analytically very clear. Stealing cars is not even the main subject, though a paralyzing mystery in the act is. By using Alex’s point of view, Mr. Weesner imbues his book with the process of that mystery, so that while we are several steps ahead of Alex we also are gripped in the puzzle of his half-understood self as he feels it.
That self emerges out of the most drably familiar American materials: freeways, traffic, roadhouses, pinball machines, the high-school basketball court, the alcoholic parent, divorce, industrial smog. A stolen car…his fourteenth…can’t help him detour that actual reality any more than truant Westerns can ride him into the sunset…
He knows he’s doing things he doesn’t want to do. He’s kept the Buick too long for safety. To a girl he picked up, he’s given a coat that was in the back seat. Some of what he does that he doesn’t want to do, he really does want to do. And he really wants to get caught…
Mr. Weesner’s plain prose fascinated me the hard way—not through questions like ‘Will Alex get depressed when he returns to school and steal another car?’, but rather in the small gestures and ordinary objects through which Mr. Weesner shows simply yet mysteriously why Alex feels as if he’s ‘standing in someone else’s body’ or feels himself to be ‘nothing.’ The book is about his effort to reach a sense of his own reality. It is quiet, fearful, at times blindingly sad stumbling motion through bad luck and persistence and good luck and passivity, the circle of circumstances, the flickering promise of the will…
The formal symmetries of ‘The Car Thief’ are not overt, but when Alex insists on visiting his brother, his father’s uneasiness signals a final turn. In this climactic episode Alex comes upon what he needs. It is what he hears in bed at night, and what he understands later when he goes to the bathroom where his mother and her husband lie nakedly asleep. What he senses within and beyond the fact of his brother’s identity is a human nature that comprehends the tragedy of Alex’s father and the happiness of his mother. Alex has found a way home to himself.
The episode is one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction, secretly and simply, like the book of which it is a part, drawing together so many themes of the life we lead in this strange county.
---Joseph McElroy, New York Times Book Review
More Praise…
“ A remarkable, gripping first novel.”
Joyce Carol Oates
“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautiful written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that tone can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”
Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe
“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief—like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”
—S. K. Oberbeck, Newsweek
“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled . . . and then some.”—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
“A simply marvelous novel. Alex emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”—Kansas City Star
When it first appeared in 1972, the Car Thief took its place as one of the great coming of age novels of the twentieth century. Forty-five years later, it brings back a lost moment in America’s past, the brash young auto industry on an exhilarating joyride, Michigan’s Motor Cities roaring with life. Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.
---Jennifer Haigh - New York Times Bestselling Author of Broken Towers, Faith, Mrs Kimble and The Condition
