5/20/2023 0 Comments The last taxi driver lee durkeeThe question is what to do with that anger. We all have a lot of anger these days, and for good reason. Instead of reaching an epiphany, Lou just keeps driving, further and deeper into a conundrum: “Is there a difference between hate and revulsion?” Durkee’s aims ultimately lie in probing, not deep existential pain, but a byproduct formed by occlusion and diversion, that sudden flash of extreme, virulent fury otherwise known as road rage, which leads one to drive around “flipping off my fellow citizens for committing driving infractions I am guilty of every hour.” In his beguiling, energetic, razor-sharp prose, Durkee pinpoints the justified resentment and righteous indignation that fuels such behavior, diagnosing it as a “yellow mind,” a psychological malady wherein one finds oneself “autocorrecting the world with a cuss-filled stream of consciousness.” This mixture of egotism, judgmentalism and aggrievement has a corrosive effect, like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to croak. Just that bug-zap of union before the bubble pops.” An adage comes to mind: Everyone forgets the day’s sermon the second they’re cut off in the church parking lot. The largest act of kindness Lou can muster toward a difficult passenger is to let him pick the music, the most transcendent experience a visit to Graceland. Eventually, he acknowledges that others suffer too, that “somebody on earth - maybe millions of people on earth - are currently having worse days than I am having,” and that “life on this planet is hard, y’all.” Blessedly, though, Durkee avoids overcommitting to this easy out. On his breaks, Lou reads his estranged girlfriend’s book on Buddhism, and ponders the wisdom of the comedian Bill Hicks. This parade of grotesques includes “craven meth heads, spit-cupped bigots, shape-shifted aliens” and “suicide ex-cons,” many of whom “don’t have but three or four teeth in their skulls.” Not wanting you to get the wrong idea, though, Lou saves the worst of his invective for the “piss-stained frat boy,” the “racist lunatics” and the “scrums of Adderall-vomiting coeds,” as well as the state of Mississippi itself, “50th out of 50.”įor a while, it appears that Lou’s journey will take him from solipsism to solidarity and compassion. ![]() Lou’s rage is palpable from the start, his inner monologue aiming an unrelenting stream of bile at the rotating cast of passengers. In between, to make ends meet, he drove a cab. ![]() Durkee knows whence he speaks: It’s been nearly 20 years since his own acclaimed debut. ![]() Lou’s fortunes have declined precipitously since his promising start “a few decades ago, back when I was a budding young writer with a swanky Brooklyn girlfriend, back before I went cold on the page and never finished that second novel I’d already been paid for.” And now things are about to get worse: Uber is coming into town to disrupt what little he has left. ![]() The book follows a single, miserable day in the life of Lou Bishoff, a worn-down, middle-aged cabdriver who narrates our story as he chauffeurs the residents of a fictional Mississippi town. Lee Durkee’s disarmingly honest and darkly comic sophomore novel, “The Last Taxi Driver,” is the most recent of these narratives of displacement. The novelist Edmund White has observed that a remarkable number of American writers, from Hawthorne to Pynchon, have endured the shock and strain of class descent, and that an entire undercurrent in American fiction is driven by the fear of such a loss in status.
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