“he’s lost his brakes”
The book opens with an action scene that serves as a much more sophisticated literary metaphor. A boy and his mother are on the side of a highway waiting for their overheated radiator to cool down enough to continue driving safely. Suddenly the loud shrill sound of a transport truck’s blow airhorn pierces the air and zooms past them at high speed. When they are finally able to continue their own way down the same path, they eventually come to the spot where a crowd is peering over a cliff to the crash site below. The imagery of a runaway behemoth heading toward disaster without being able to do anything to stop thus becomes the controlling metaphor for all that follows.
Illusion is Reality
Much of the story is situated within an environment of deception in which what seems to be is taken on face as what really is. The epigraph which precedes the narrative is a quote from that most quotable of authors, Oscar Wilde, who asserts that “the duty in life is to assume a pose.” This concept of striking a pose as a façade for the purpose of hiding the truth is prevalent throughout and very often is manifested in explicit behavior:
“The camouflage coat made me feel like a sniper, and before long I began to act like one.”
Character Description
The author is fond of using the accessibility of the comparison of a simile as efficient shorthand for delineating character. That simple introduction of a “like” or “as” convey as much information in line as an entire paragraph of non-comparison descriptive prose:
“Phil had been badly burned in a warehouse fire that left his skin blister-smooth and invested with an angry glow, as if the fire still burned somewhere inside him.”
Self-Reflection
The book is written in the first person, making its status as an autobiographical memoir more viscerally believable. The narrator describes events taking place in his past, but also reveals a penchant for honest and forthright self-reflection which he often outlines in figurative imagery:
“Whenever I was told to think about something, my mind became a desert.”
Rubes in the City
A trip to Seattle stimulates the author to create one of his most fully packed metaphorical images. The word choice, the philosophical assertion and the rather ambiguous conclusion all work together to create a singularly memorable moment frozen in time:
“The farther we got from Seattle the louder we sang. We were rubes, after all, and for a rube the whole point of a trip to the city is the moment of leaving it, the moment it closes behind his back like a trap sprung too late.”
