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CAR by Harry Crews

CAR

By

Pub Date: Feb. 24th, 1971
Publisher: Morrow

What else can a boy who's been brought up in AUTO-TOWN, forty-three acres wide and no one knows how deep in junked cars, do when he grows up but consummate his (and America's) love affair with cars by eating one -- in this case a Ford Maverick (not the spare tire or the jack, just the basic car), in half-ounce lumps, half a pound a day, for what will take slightly over ten years'? The crowds love it,' but when Herman can no longer take such pain from something he loves, he retreats with Margo, the hotel whore he's never made it with (""When it was possible, I was always thinking about the car""), back to Auto-Town turning the sordid business over to his town brother Mister, who passes blood along with the half-ounce lumps because his guts, in a very fabled way, do not want the car. An amusing, rather depressing tale about our bumper-to-bumper landscape and the people who flock to see CAR DISPLAY: YOUR HISTORY ON PARADE in terms which are not as deceptively easy as they might appear on the surface.