Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Best times of your life, just you and the road, leaving all the rest of this shit behind. The man called Driver has no end of shit to leave behind, but he can't outdrive it. In this sequel to Drive (2005), perhaps the most marrow-deep noir novel published in the last 20 years, Sallis wastes no time setting the hook. They came for him just after 11:00 on a Saturday morning, two of them. They don't get him, but there is collateral damage, putting paid to Driver's attempt to live a straight life. Somehow Driver always knew that pointing his car away from trouble was futile, so with the help of his one friend, ex-gangbanger Felix, he does a 180 and hits the gas. Unadulterated noir as opposed to the plethora of thrillers that now carry that much-abused label is never about plot. There is no narrative arc to noir. The action moves in a straight line downward. It's all about tone, and Sallis, perhaps the most genuinely poetic crime writer alive, bleeds tone on every page, crafting sentences that read like a Thomas Hardy lyric. In a sense, nothing happens in Driven. It ends just as it begins: In the rearview mirror he watched them moving toward them. He turned the radio on. He smiled. He drove. If you read crime fiction only for story, you probably won't get real noir, and you certainly won't connect with Sallis. But if you read for that peculiar mix of helplessness and adrenalin that comes from seeing where the road ends and trying to drive through it anyway, fasten your seatbelt.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The enigmatic loner known as Driver, introduced in 2005's Drive, takes to the road again after two thugs assault him and his fiancee on a Phoenix, Ariz., street in this terse, brutal, poetic, perfectly wrought sequel. Maybe Driver is paranoid, but is it really paranoia when one team of hit men after another track you down and try to put you on ice? "Two cars this time, and they'd waited for an isolated stretch of road. Chevy Caprice and a high-end Toyota." Sallis once again pays homage to the tight behaviorist style of French noir master Jean-Patrick Manchette ("he felt the trachea give way and fold in on itself") and the bleak existential world of criminals beloved by fans of the films of Charles Bronson and Alain Delon, not to mention the passionate cult following for the 2011 film version of Drive. As is the case for all such episodes in the life of the stoic driver, you can come into this excellent novel cold, strap in, just hit the gas, and go. Author tour. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Sallis's slim sequel to his acclaimed Drive might at first glance seem like a prose poem or a children's book. With its close attention to telling detail and a vocabulary that rarely ranges beyond two-syllable words, it is a bit of both, mixed with interludes of extreme violence, in an angst-drenched Phoenix. That is to say that this novel is a close to perfectly executed noir. By the second paragraph, Driver sees his lover viciously shot dead at his side, and this causes him to set out to discover who is after him. The language is plain, the action is brutal, and the characters are memorably and briefly etched. Typical is this characterization of a suburban couple: "Sectional couch! Jell-O salad! Mashed potatoes! Lawrence Welk!" Charles Bukowski couldn't have said it better. VERDICT Coming hard on the heels of the 2011 film version of cult favorite Drive, this gritty, gristly tale will rivet Sallis's growing audience.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Just in time for fans of the Ryan Gosling film adaptation, the further adventures of Driver (Drive, 2005). He's been calling himself Paul West for seven years. That's the name by which his fiance, Elsa Jorgenson, knew him when she died, killed by a pair of goons Driver swiftly dispatched. But everyone outside Elsa's family ("we are your family," her father mournfully tells him) still calls him Driver. It's presumably Driver, not Paul West, that the men sent to follow him are interested in. Acquiring an innocuous-looking Fairlane 500 and tweaking its engine, Driver begins to make more and more adventurous forays outside Phoenix, where he's settled. He shares portentous conversations with his hardheaded buddy Felix and his screenwriter friend Manny. He hooks up with law student Stephanie Cooper, whose ex-cop father Bill is sitting in a nursing home indulging in even more cryptic exchanges with exSpecial Forces visitor Wendell. He takes a meeting with self-anointed problem solver James Beil, who hints that Driver's problems may be closely akin to his own. He works his way up the food chain to post-Katrina carpetbagger Gerald Dunaway and big wolf Bennie Capel in a search for whoever's sent the interchangeable guys who've been dogging his tracks. All the while, Sallis (The Killer Is Dying, 2011, etc.) is using his mouthpieces to dispense nonstop nuggets of existential wisdom ("We think we make choices. But what happens is the choices walk up, stand face to face with us, and stare us down") that both prepare and compensate for the inconclusiveness of the plot. The noir formula readily accommodates Sallis' mannered dialogue. Even so, most readers will feel a jarring split between the ostensibly thrilling tale and the downbeat commonplaces that punctuate it, or vice versa.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
