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Car Trouble

J. Ladd Zorn

 

Car Trouble

 

Set mainly in Southern California during the recession of the first Bush administration, Car Trouble (94,000 words), an edgy literary novel, blends psychological suspense and dark humor about a twenty-one-year-old Disneyland Goofy who turns to smuggling guns in the hopes of scoring enough money to make it to a quiet Utah Ranch. 

 

When his car burns to the ground, with wallet and keys inside, Jim Crack (his grandfather’s name was changed from Slavic at Ellis Island) is propelled through a Southern California odyssey which takes him from the parties of Newport Beach, where he grapples with memories of his childhood, to Las Vegas, where he becomes entangled in a plot to smuggle guns to a mobster with terrorist connections. Along the way, Jim gets thrown in jail for stealing his car back from an unscrupulous towing agency, leading to a reunion with his abusive father. When Jim’s best friend, Adam, an alcoholic Mormon, decides it’s time to get clean back in Utah, Jim believes his only chance for sanity is to follow Adam to a place where he hopes he can finally live in peace---if he can just deliver the guns,collect his money, and get out alive. These are the novel’s surface qualities, but truly it is a psychological work which explores the moral complexity of contemporary life, delving into questions of sex, religion, mental illness, homelessness, sin, and redemption in American culture. 

The wait is over. Car Trouble here! Thrilling and entertaining, like the experience on a crazy roller coaster.

No one ever said this in The New York Times

 

 Car Trouble is an indefinite page-flipper.

The Washington Post did not run any such blurb

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