Review of Kate Wisel’s Driving in Cars with Homeless Men
Driving in Cars with Homeless Men: Stories
University of Pittsburgh Press
October 2019
ISBN: 978-0822945680
185 pages
reviewed by D. Arthur
Kate Wisel’s short story collection Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, opens with an atmospheric piece of flash fiction that hovers like a dark and heavy raincloud signaling the downpour to come. In “Hoops,” this opening story, we are introduced to the four women we will follow throughout this collection: Serena, Frankie, Natalya, and Raffa. We are also plunged headfirst into the violent world they must navigate. Wisel’s collection features twenty loosely linked stories spread across different sections, each titled for one of the four women whose perspective is used. Aided by Wisel’s forceful prose, all of the pieces stand alone. When read together, they create even more powerful snapshots of characters that we come to know during different stages in their lives, from childhood into adulthood.
Wisel’s prose is layered, rich, and sharp, and the language is always grounded in the point of view of the characters. In “Frankie,” Serena compares a view in New Hampshire to a Jeep commercial. In “Stop It,” Natalya describes a burn “the size of a beer can, smooth and pink as bubble gum.”
These women have lived through violence, but they are more than just victims. It has become easy to point to stories that feel relevant to the “#MeToo” era, but the truth that thrums under Wisel’s stories is that for many women this violence is and has been inescapable; violence against women is more than just a phenomenon neatly tied to an era. Frankie, Serena, Nat, and Raffa are each fully formed humans who work and love and fight.
While all four women navigate violence in their relationships, the reader spends the most time with Serena. In “She Says She Wants One Thing,” she directly confronts and questions this violence and the systems that make room for it. She specifically interrogates the mechanics of victimhood: the way that the court system puts the burden not on the “criminal wife-beaters,” but instead on the “ring-twisting women they had beaten and would beat again.”
While Wisel’s stories have grit and gravitas, they also leave room for buoyancy and joy. Two standout stories from Serena’s point-of-view use humor to show the texture of her life. In “How I Dance,” a playful flash piece, Serena and her brother act out increasingly absurd scenes with balloons—childbirth, a breast implant procedure, CPR—on the dance floor at their father’s wedding to a much younger woman. In “Trouble,” Serena’s abusive boyfriend tries to end a fight by gifting her a dog she doesn’t want. The scenario produces sharp moments of wordplay that spring from Serena naming the dog Trouble. “I’d never asked for Trouble,” she says, and we can tell that she is talking about more than just the dog.
The collection’s violent men range from vivid villains to anonymous and replaceable caricatures. The women, however, are often equally flawed. The book isn’t afraid to look directly at violence against women while avoiding the overly glossy sheen of a girl-power narrative. These stories show fierce love and warmth between women, but they also show women making mistakes and being flawed in a genuine way that, if it doesn’t make them to blame for the chaos in their lives, also doesn’t let them completely off the hook.
While Wisel’s collection portrays a widespread violence and a scrambling desire that can be seen in the lives of working-class women in many cities, the details are wrought in such a way that Boston becomes an essential part of the text. More specifically, there are two Bostons in the world of these women: the cosmopolitan downtown Boston they sometimes glimpse, and the outskirts of the city that they inhabit. In “Stage Four,” Frankie embarks on a relationship with an older man who takes her on glamorous-seeming dates at hotels downtown while her mom struggles with illness back home. In “Hoops,” the girls can see that “beyond the tips of trees, the Boston skyline looked tiny as a postcard in the window of a gift shop [they] were once kicked out of.” In “English High,” we follow Nat as she is living in her car and “for a second Nat is Boston, ancient and tense.”
Wisel also explores a more zoomed-in sense of place. The story “Cribs” is an atmospheric triumph that opens Frankie’s first section and brings all of the women into focus through the homes they shared and left. This second-person story follows Frankie from home to home in vignettes that are delineated by address. In this and other stories, home is shown as often transient and nebulous. The women of Wisel’s collection are frequently avoiding things at home—sick mothers, cruel mothers, abusive partners. Cars show up regularly and seem to represent a method of getting out, getting away, and creating a sense of home that is mobile. Sometimes these women don’t want to be home, can’t be home, or don’t have a home.
With Wisel in the driver’s seat, the reader should happily buckle up and enjoy the ride.
D. Arthur (@babydmarie) is a Buffalo, NY based fiction writer, humor writer, and events producer. Her work can be found in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Peach Mag, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the Media & News Director for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Outreach Coordinator for Peach Mag, and a fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine. She is currently at work on her first novel. For more, visit www.d-arthur.com.
Kate Wisel is a native of Boston. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and is currently a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches fiction, works as an assistant for music critic Jim DeRogatis and is at work on a novel in stories.