What is considered to be the ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for the new generation, The Car Thief by Theodore Weesner shares with us an authentic tale of an angst ridden teen (Alex) staring at the inevitable future ahead of him with melancholy helplessness.
The story in its essence is about a teen escaping his life through an obsession of stealing cars. Surrounded in late 50s Detroit that is encased in fears of communism and job loss, his father working at a Chevy Plant drowning himself in alcoholism. It isn’t without irony that his father works at a Chevy Plant and he happens to steal cars, as if it were some disconnected bond between two people who never spoke. Feeling abandoned and alone from his father, his mother having abandoned him at 3 and then later coming to take his brother away, Alex drives methodically in patterns.
This story for me seemed as though it was also the story of America, its forgotten children, the abandonment of what established us and the loss that each generation feels in the push towards a semblance of hope. A coming of age story in honesty and in symbolism.
Slowly, through trials and tribulations, Alex begins to find himself, courage and after much self-realization – the hope for a better future. As all of us, he must face what reality awaits him and find his own way to persevere, in the end it takes loss to gain a foothold. Theodore Weesner writes this semi-autobiography with insurmountable heart, the care he had taken towards the expression of not only Alex, but the story itself breath so much life that it makes you ache.
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.
If you enjoy coming of age novels, classics like The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger or Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, you will love this story. It carries with it beautiful tragedy and aching hope in humanity, a vivid reality of what we hold inside of us. There is something about reading this book at this time in our economy and our lives that really made it poignant and I am sure that you who decide to pick it up will understand as well. Alex is not just a 16 year old boy trying to find himself in this story, sometimes I found that he was just the driver taking us on a forbidden ride into a deep logic.
Incredible story.
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Purchase: You can purchase The Car Thief by Theodore Weesner on Kindle for $7.19 or on Paperback for $13.00.