She Drove without Stopping: A Novel

by Jaimy Gordon

Jamie Gordon's second novel, ten years in the making, is a further triumph of exuberant storytelling from the author of Shamp of the City-Solo. The ultimate woman's road novel, She Drove Without Stopping presents young Jane Turner's journey toward self-possession. As she refuses to turn back from a terrain we all know is dangerous for women, her wit wrestles violence she encounters on a risky odyssey from coast to coast.

Genres: Fiction

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Jaimy Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman was on the Los Angeles Times list of Best Books for 2000. Her second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, brought her an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordon's short story, "A Night's Work," which shares a number of characters with Lord of Misrule, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1995. She is also the author of a novella, Circumspections from an Equestrian Statue, and the fantasy classic novel Shamp of the City-Solo. Gordon teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Reviews

[Joseph Laizure]

Jaimy Gordon's language is scaring me. It's tough and generous and unashamed. But it also swerves (sorry) toward a kind of fake lyricism that is choking American fiction in and out of MFA programs, the kind of writing where unusual vocabulary and an excess of figurative language is rallied to give the impression of tremendous significance to every tiny event, such that everything in a novel can have a uniform significance, a uniform terror, and a uniform tension, so that nothing is tense at all. But I don't find myself saying, "No, it's not like that," or sneering at this book the way I do when I'm reading a novel that indulges in that kind of writing. I'm nervous because this book might actually be great.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exhilarating, funny and precise look at what it means to be young, white, smart and female in America in the 20th century, this novel follows Jane Kaplan Turner in her 21st year as she sets out to rid herself of her upper middle class bourgeois life and find adventure, first in rural Ohio, then on a drive across the country to the wrong side of Los Angeles in the 1960s. But, before we get there with her, we first are treated to vignettes of her childhood in Baltimore and the complex relationship with her parents, Phillip and Sasha Turner, which set the psychological stage for Jane's complicated choices in early adulthood, from the men she courts and rejects to the fringes of lawlessness she skirts in trying to figure out if a woman can be alone, happy and secure in this country. At times thrilling, funny and deeply philosophical, Ms. Gordon's writing is a treat to read, with it's vainglorious metaphors, apt repetitions of phrase and sharp wit, the narrative whizzes by as fast as Jane can run from place to place. As our country is currently embroiled in a great feminist debate, it's novels like this that can give us real insight into the behaviors and aggressions that form women's identities from birth, and the toll it takes to overcome them. As Jane observes after one of her many great confrontations with the men who think they have the answers around her, "no psychiatrist will ever cure her heart, which hurts for good reason. It has been folded the wrong way as many times as the crumpled map in her glove compartment." We are just lucky that Ms. Gordon decided to write about each of those folds with aplomb.

[Kenneth Timmerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Jaimy has written better books and is one of my generation of authors worth reading.

[Melanie Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a copy of the book with a different cover, but it's the same publisher, I believe:



Phew! I survived! Jaimy Gordon’s second novel, She Drove Without Stopping, is both dense and long. It took me 19 days to finish, which for a blogger trying to keep up on content is forever. Fortunately, I had some other reviews scheduled during this time already.

If Jaimy Gordon sounds familiar, it’s because I love and rave about Bogeywoman, which is also a dense book, but the main character spends most of her time interacting with some of the best-written minor characters I’ve read. Bogeywoman is also 100 pages shorter than She Drove Without Stopping.

In this novel, Jane is born the happiest baby in the world. It’s obvious to readers that something is amiss between her parents, especially the father, who likes to squeeze Jane’s bare buttock from the time she is an infant through high school. As she ages, her father sees her more as a creature that a person. The relationship is toxic, and I’m sure there are odd layers of sexual power battles in there to be picked apart. The narrator implies her father may be gay, though he’s a womanizer. It’s complicated.

Jane heads off to some “beatnik” college circa 1965 where she can’t sleep in the dorms, so she finds an abandoned house to squat in. Along comes a boyfriend, and it’s implied that he’s got a financial net from his parents, but he lives like he’s homeless. He’s an artist, man. Some stoners and junkers from the area, known as The Soul of Commerce, befriend Jane and her boyfriend, and Jaimy Gordon shines again with her secondary characters and their dialogue:

Felix says, “A chicken ain’t even a bird.”

“It ain’t! Then what is it?”

“Felix is silent for a moment, gazing at the darkening cornfield. “It’s a food,” he says. “Man done made it, just like a hot dot. Like baloney. It’s progress.”

“Don’t tell me about progress,” Willie says. “Baloney don’t run around a barnyard flapping its wings.”

Gordon takes us back to the tradition of people sitting on a porch and sharing what they know: stories, observations, old-timey remedies, gossip. These are the best moments in the novel, though they didn’t happen as often in She Drove Without Stopping as it did in Bogeywoman.

Another key difference is that She Drove Without Stopping is in 3rd-person. The narrator is heavy handed while trying to explain what Jane’s motives in life are. The last chapter is in 1st-person, and I felt like I knew Jane infinitely better in those final pages than anywhere else. Bogeywoman was done so well and richly in 1st-person that I felt a million miles away from Jane — and I didn’t like nor empathize with her. I do wish there had been less focus on Jane’s internal life via an omniscient narrator who almost seems to not know Jane.

The novel says a lot about how women and minorities are treated in the United States. Many characters Jane befriends are African American or Native American. She herself is white, but she’s the victim of power dynamics between men and women, authorities and women. When a strange man forces himself on her, Jane is not believed by the local police, who work to prove she’s a whore for hanging out with a Black man.

Given that it’s 1965, Gordon says a lot about that year without directly point out what happened in history that year. It’s a clever way of saying something without saying it. I’m especially thinking of the way I keep reading novels that are set in NYC when 9/11 happened, but 9/11 is only tangentially related to the story. Or, how many civil rights novels find the main character marching to Selma or at the March on Washington. Do they need to be there for this novel to say something about the Civil Rights Movement?

Although it takes patience and perseverance, Gordon’s second novel never made me want to quit reading, though I didn’t read for as long as I typically would each sitting. It’s a traditional Bildungsroman with the ending we all must learn — that we are just like our parents in ways we don’t want to be — but it’s all the people whom she encounters who make this novel interesting.

This review was originally published at Grab the Lapels.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must have read this shortly after it was published, though I thought it was an older novel at the time because of its setting in the 1960's. I was in high school, and it put a few cracks in the concrete around my tiny worldview. I may be remembering it wrong, but it seemed very stream-of-consciousness. I thought the protagonist made a lot of bad choices, but her struggle to gain and own her identity always stuck with me. Most recently, Lost by Cheryl Strayed reminded me of this book again.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I missed the characters when I finished.

[Jamee Zielke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretentious. Disturbing. Tough read.

It was a lot of work reading this book.

[Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was very disturbing, besides being hard to read. I don't recommend it at all.